Re: Draft iXML minutes, 4 March 2025

Fredrik said: "With the current state of the parsers, it's very expensive 
to parse a huge file. It's more efficient to do it in a record-oriented 
way."


Surely it is trivial to spot if a grammar can be treated in a 
record-oriented way. I would put this in the class of "possible 
optimisations", and not encumber the user with having to know about it.


Sounds like a good topic for a Balisage paper (deadline 4 April, or 6 June 
for late-breaking).


Steven

On Tuesday 18 March 2025 13:50:26 (+01:00), Steven Pemberton wrote:


Looks like you had a great discussion in the status reports section. Sorry 
I missed it.


Bethan says: "What I'm interested in working on are tools that will treat 
your grammar as a generator rather than a recognizer."


I've written several of these in the past (for instance, when I wrote a 
version of Eliza, the Rogerian psychotherapist, I wrote another program to 
generate random paranoid ramblings for Eliza to respond to 
(https://cwi.nl/~steven/Talks/2024/09-oxford/ai.html#L2734)


In fact, they are quite easy to write, since it is just a recursive random 
path through the grammar tree. This is the complete code, where 'thing' is 
either a terminal or nonterminal ('choice' returns a random element of a 
sequence, in this case returning a random alternative from a rule):


HOW TO GENERATE thing 
 FROM grammar:
     SELECT:
         
nonterminal(thing):
             FOR symbol 
IN choice grammar[thing]:
             
     GENERATE symbol FROM grammar
         
ELSE:
             WRITE thing, " 
"


And you generate one rambling with "GENERATE '<sentence>' FROM sentences"


Steven


On Tuesday 04 March 2025 16:42:47 (+01:00), Norm Tovey-Walsh wrote:



 > Hi folks,

 >

 > Draft minutes are online:

 >

 > https://www.w3.org/2025/03/04-ixml-minutes.html

 >

 > Be seeing you,

 > norm

 >

 > --

 > Norm Tovey-Walsh

 > Saxonica

 >

 >