Re: Uncertainties in (English) Notation

[cowan (John Cowan)]

I wrote, in the EBNF grammar explanations:

> The elidable terminators make the language unambiguous, but may often be
> omitted without loss of ambiguity, especially when there is more than one
> in a row.

Doug Landauer <landauer@eng.sun.com> rewrote this as:

> 	The elidable terminators, when present, make the language
> 	unambiguous.  However, they may often be omitted without
> 	making an utterance ambiguous, especially when there are
> 	more than one in a row.

That's more like it.  "Loss of ambiguity" should have been just "ambiguity".
In addition, the confusion over whether "elidable" was descriptive (as I
intended) or defining (as Guy Steele assumed) made matters worse.

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