Re: ni

["Lee Daniel Crocker (none)" <lcrocker@MERCURY.COLOSSUS.NET>]

>>As for as the language design goes, ANY kind of sumti can go in any place
>>of any selbri.  The semantics might be impossible, but that just makes life
>>more fun.  So far as I am concerned, this debate is about what is
>>semantically sensible in the specified places, which is not a grammatical
>>issue and is not intended to be covered by the refgrammar or the gismu list
>>in quite so authoritative a sense as the grammar is covered.

While I heartily agree, that doesn't imply that such discussion is not
valuable or even necessary.  We all agree that the x2 and x3 places
of {klama} both refer to a location; is there no point in the reference
works being clear which is the source and which the destination?  I,
personally, like to know whether I'm coming or going.

In computer terms, knowing that function1(arg1, arg2) is in the
correct syntax doesn't tell me what the function does; for that I need
not only a description of the function but some idea of what kinds of
arguments it expects and what it will do with them.  Even in a "loosely
typed" language like Lojban (where any argument can syntactically fit
into any place), I still need to know what arguments are /expected/
to know how to call the function.

So the question becomes, what kinds of arguments are expected in the
function call {xy. ni broda zy.}?  Maybe saying "a quantity" and
"a scale for that quantity" is sufficent definition, and if we fill
it with either a number or an abstraction, so be it.  But if that
causes other problems (and I'm not sure that it does, but I still
suspect so}, then maybe we need to be clearer.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC