Wuzzy wrote:
> > Examples: «zo ti poiklo li vo (lo lerpoi pe) lu mi ti do dunda
li'u»,
> > «zo ti poiklo ci da (lo lerpoi pe) lu ti titranti li'u»
> > (I'm not quite sure whether quotes can be treated directly as phoneme
> > sequences, but this seems sensible enough.)
>
>
> A string is an arbitrary sequence of characters (see lerpoi). The
> closest equivalent in Lojban for this are zoi-quotes, not lu-quotes.
> Your “lu” seems a bit contrived, since spacing in Lojban is a bit
> liberal. Thus, “lu mi ti do dunda li'u” is (and should be) treated
as
> identical to “lu mitido dunda li'u”. Unless you invent a rule to
count
> positions in “lu” strings, I suggest to avoid “lu” and
“lo'u”
> quotes as sumti for poiklo.
>
> I think that poiklo is most useful with zoi-quotes.
>
> I guess a more practical example would be something like this:
> “zoi gy.http.gy. poiklo li pa zoi
gy.http://jbovlaste.lojban.org/.gy.”
> → “‘http’ is a substring at position 1 of the string
> ‘http://jbovlaste.lojban.org/’.”
>
> Oh, and that counting begins by 0 is not at all a “standard” in
> programming languages. There are a couple of languages where counting
> starts by 1. I have removed that part of the sentence from the notes.

I have made a proposal to la gleki about something quite closely related.
I decided that spaces do count between brivla because they must be encoded
somehow (alternatives include marking vowels or syllables in some way):
they convey indestructible information in that context. In that case,
strings have an extra "hidden letter", where I interpret each letter to be
a unit of conveyed information (meaningful in context). The information is
what is being counted, actually, not symbols or phonemes. I also start
counting from 1 in Lojban, but we should really formalize and systematize
it as a community after much debate. I usually specify at least the first
element in my definitions and also try to allude to the ordering. I will
try to find the message and post its content somewhere.
This has combinatorial uses, btw!

I much prefer the current definition and do not have any immediately
obvious concerns.