[YG Conlang Archives] > [engelang group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >
MatthewDeanMartin, On 15/04/2011 21:27:
Besides notepad and pencil& paper?
In my case, none. But I can't even think of what I would wish for, other than notepad. You mention parsers, but parsers written for natlangs don't truly parse, and even if you were to create something that could genuinely be parsed by a parser, you then be designing something constrained by the need to work with the parser. So what would you wish for? --And.
I tried ANTLR, but it is so optimized for computer programming languages, it was hard read the documentation& see how it could be applied to a spoken language governed by BNF. The other one I looked at was GOLD, again, it's really aimed at people creating programming languages. http://www.devincook.com/goldparser/about/index.htm And is BNF even the right meta-language to be working with? I've used the free AGFL parser, too. AGFL is all about doing one style of formal grammars for existing languages, like Dutch or English or what not, less focused on computer languages, but tightly focused on the developers next research paper. I wrote up the AGFL syntax grammar for toki pona (using some else's BNF). Running AGFL you either get nothing (fails to parse) or you get an enumeration of every possible parse tree, which for tp, turned out to be a lot (like 100s for a medium size sentence). So, it's a kind of a 2 trick pony. So any suggestions for what sort of formal meta language to use& what tool to demonstrate a grammar "works"? Matthew Martin