Combined link-generator + parser

[linas]

@ampli what are the technical issues that would block a combined link-generator+link-parser? So that for example) if link-parser is started with a --generate flag, then it would parse the way it does today, except when it sees \* in the input stream; then it would treat this as a generator wildcard, but otherwise continue as normal?

This would vaguely resemble what the spell-guesser does. ...

[ampli]

There is no need for a --generate flag, as the library can set the generation mode for the current sentence if any generation syntax is detected. (Generation syntax may include \* and any additional syntax we may add, e.g., \[word1, word2] for a list of words, or \{} over optional words.) The generation backend (we still need it in order to stuff words instead of categories) would be part of link-parser and be invoked at the final stage if the sentence got parsed in generation mode (we may have a read-only parse option to indicate that). We would have to add some of the link-generator flags as link-parser variables and merge its manual with link-parser.

[linas]

OK, cool. I plan to mess with generation in the upcoming weeks/months. Mostly at the API level; having the command-line tool helps as a sanity-check.