Deconstructing the VMS : A positionless ledger (part 1)

[Jorge_Stolfi]

So could a procedure that simply walked the ledger's allowed transitions produce arbitrarily long strings? Sure. I could take English word rules and create one. But that's a property of a traversal procedure, not of the ledger or English rules. Like English, the scribes clearly weren't just blindly walking every available transition. ... The ledger is only half of the rule system. The scribal policy is the other half.

Any FSA can be used indifferently as a string generator or a string validator.  The "language" of the FSA is the set of all strings it can generate, which is the same as the set of all strings that it will accept.

So you are saying that your ledger aims only for maximum "coverage" of the VMS text, not maximum "precision".  That is, you care only that its language L contains all the strings of glyphs that occur in the VMS text without spaces.  You don't care about how many strings are in L that do not occur in the VMS.

That makes the ledger less interesting than other models that account for spaces and try to balance coverage and precision, like slot grammars and the early FSA models.  The VMS text has many errors that create single-occurrence word types with unusual digraphs, trigraphs, etc.  Transcription errors add to that.  By trying to include those weird words, the ledger ends up accepting a lot more than it should.   Thus the ledger will not tell many constraints that are almost certainly true, like "a word can have at most one gallows" and "there cannot be a d between two ch".

All the best, --stolfi