Um, I'm gonna guess that Nick is not an Emacs user. Quite the opposite,
probably.
On Jan 21, 2013 6:33 PM, "Marcus G. Daniels" <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 1/21/13 3:34 PM, Douglas Roberts wrote:
>
> Uh, I'm gonna guess that Nick is not a Unix user.
>
> Unix tools are not the best for this kind of task. One would better
> served with a programmable editor or e-mail client that can traverse lines
> and work in terms of sentences and paragraphs. One editor that is
> well-suited to this, and can work in batch Emacs.
>
> Consider if someone is writing on a portable device and enters narrow text
> with this form..
>
> Let's extract a
> sentence that crosses
> several
> lines.
>
> Line oriented (Unix) tools will require assembling up until the "." is
> reached. In Emacs, to append a sentence to a list `l' it's easy:
>
> (setq l nil)
>
> (defun grab-sentence ()
> (interactive)
> (push
> (let ((start (point)))
> (forward-sentence)
> (buffer-substring start (point)))
> l))
>
> Yielding a list with one string:
>
> ("Let's extract a sentence that crosses several lines.")
>
> On second call, the list grows to two elements, and so on.
>
> But that's just a baby step. Then one needs to categorize text by its
> owner. One way to do this is to read chronologically from top to bottom,
> and assume that first occurrence, especially if there is no leading ">" is
> the author named in the last From line. Even the quoting conventions
> change depending on what mail program is used. Some people like to tag
> with names or initials as delimiters, others quote passages with quotation
> marks, others (like Emacs users), have tags per line like Nick>, others
> just simply ">", ">>", as quoting levels, still others use richtext cues
> like boldface.
>
> What's needed is a sort of content-addressable memory (e.g. a hash from
> text to author).
>
> And for goodness sake, stop pretending that the mailing list is anything
> like a collaborative essay. It is not, there is no central purpose. No
> one has agreed on anything. A mailing list is a set of people approaching
> a topic from their own point of view, and in the process redefining what
> the topic is. It's not a blog, which is one person's point of view, with
> some attached comments.
>
> Marcus
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
