A teacher who asks a student about her home and then accuses the student of lying is aa bully, a fool and unfit to be near children. A competent teacher would ask for details or verification. I'm surprised she wasn't run out of town on a rail. I suspect that there are homes with twice as many dictionaries, either on paper or electronic.
I learned early on that it was faster to do my own keypunching, because I didn't have to waste time finding and correcting transcription errors. I've seen some awful results from GT; we're doing better, but we're not there yet. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 עַם יִשְׂרָאֵל חַי נֵ֣צַח יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל לֹ֥א יְשַׁקֵּ֖ר ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> on behalf of Phil Smith III <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, January 2, 2025 12:04 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Assembler vs. assembly vs. machine code External Message: Use Caution This thread has not disappointed. Lots of good history. Re Autocoder: My dad was hired by OGA (Other Government Agency, aka CIA) in the 50s, as he was working on his PhD in Slavic linguistics, to work on their machine translation project. He would describe to a programmer what he wanted a program to do; the programmer would write it out on Autocoder sheets; a keypunch operator would input it; and a day or two later, he'd find out what it did. He figured out that if he learned to program, he could shorten that cycle time, so he did. Which led to another machine translation project at IBM Yorktown. Neither was successful. He subsequently wound up in academia but continued to freelance for the government doing translations, typically of obscure Slavic languages for which they didn't have any resident experts. This led to a fun incident in high school where my sister's class was asked to see if they had a dictionary in the house; she reported that she'd found 42. And was accused of lying. Which got the teacher a visit from my dad, who was cheerful but direct about it, and who noted that this list included the Polish-Russian Technical Dictionary, which included not a word of English... I wish he'd lived long enough to see Google Translate, which, while not perfect, is pretty impressive--and which, when backed by someone fluent, is surely able to improve translation times of critical documents by an order of magnitude or two. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
