Preform grammar for the articles.

§1.

define DEF_ART 1  the definite article
define INDEF_ART 2  the indefinite article
define NO_ART 3  no article supplied
define IT_ART 4  a special case to handle "it"

<article> ::=
    <indefinite-article> |      ==> R[1]
    <definite-article>          ==> R[1]

• This is Preform grammar, not regular C code.

§2. The articles need to be single words, and the following two productions have an unusual convention: they are required to have production numbers which encode both the implied grammatical number and gender. These numbers mean:

/a/ singular, neuter; /b/ singular, masculine; /c/ singular, feminine; /d/ plural, neuter; /e/ plural, masculine; /f/ plural, feminine.

But since in English gender doesn't appear in articles, and "the" is ambiguous as to number in any case, we end up with something quite dull as the default:

<definite-article> ::=
    /a/ the

<indefinite-article> ::=
    /a/ a/an |
    /d/ some

• This is Preform grammar, not regular C code.

§3. These are useful for stripping optional articles from text:

<optional-definite-article> ::=
    <definite-article> ... |
    ...

<optional-article> ::=
    <article> ... |
    ...

<compulsory-article> ::=
    <article> ...

• This is Preform grammar, not regular C code.

§4.

wording Articles::remove_the?Usage of Articles::remove_the:
Determiners and Quantifiers - §17(wording W) {
    if ((Wordings::length(W) > 1) && (<optional-definite-article>(W)))
        return GET_RW(<optional-definite-article>, 1);
    return W;
}

wording Articles::remove_article(wording W) {
    if (Wordings::nonempty(W)) {
        <optional-article>(W);
        return GET_RW(<optional-article>, 1);
    }
    return W;
}

§5. It's very important to parse articles, which occur very often, rapidly. So we give these special priority in Preform optimisation; they have their very own private bit.

void Articles::mark_for_preform?Usage of Articles::mark_for_preform:
Linguistics Module - §3(void) {
    NTI::give_nt_reserved_incidence_bit(<article>, ARTICLE_RES_NT_BIT);
    NTI::give_nt_reserved_incidence_bit(<definite-article>, ARTICLE_RES_NT_BIT);
    NTI::give_nt_reserved_incidence_bit(<indefinite-article>, ARTICLE_RES_NT_BIT);
}