Lambda the Ultimate

I am reading The language instinct from Steven Pinker. Some of the examples he has are very familiar to compiler construction.

Shift/Reduce conflictis a conflict in LALR grammars (most programming languages) where in the parser has to decide between shifting a new token for a rule or reducing the rule. Quoting Stephen C. Johnson from the YACC paper

As an example of the power of disambiguating rules, consider a fragment from a programming language involving an ``if-then-else'' construction:

    
   stat  :  IF  '('  cond  ')'  stat
         |  IF  '(' cond ')'  stat  ELSE  stat ;

These two rules form an ambiguous construction, since input of the form

   IF  ( C1 )  IF  ( C2 )  S1 ELSE  S2

can be structured according to these rules in two ways:

   IF  ( C1 )  {
                IF  ( C2 )  S1
               }
   ELSE S2

or

   IF  ( C1 )  {
                IF  ( C2 )  S1
                ELSE  S2
               }

The second interpretation is the one given in most programming languages having this construct.

That is during a shift/reduce conflict, LALR parsers chose shift over reduce, implying that clauses are always associated with the innermost clause.

On the human side of the equation, Steven Pinker talks about Chomsky's classic illustration of turning a declarative sentence into a question

         A unicorn is in the garden
   -> Is a unicorn    in the garden?

This is done by taking the auxiliary "is" and moving it. However, this is not a simple move as illustrated in the below case

            A unicorn that is eating a flower is in the garden
   ->    Is a unicorn that is eating a flower    in the garden?

Chomsky argues that our mental algorithm does not pick words by their linear positions, but does so by grouping it into phrases, implying that during a conflict the mind chooses entire units together.

Does this mean that the designers of LALR were goaded by their mintal algorithm to chose shift instead of reduce? Or does this mean that language is an algorithm (albeit more powerful than any parser) that is wired into our brain - and evolution chose shift over reduce because that is the easier one to implement?

Also at here

Not really the PL-applicable sort of topology, but I think it will be interest to a fair few folks here: there's a PDF scan of James Munkres (2000) Topology available.

Postscript: Not anymore. I guess it was not a legitimate distribution of the text.

Postscript #2: Or maybe it does still, for some...