On Wed, 4 Apr 2001, Simon Cozens wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 04, 2001 at 02:10:11PM +0100, Mark Fowler wrote:
> > Ah, but with perl code there is a definite 'correct' parsing (whatever
> > /usr/bin/perl does[1]) but with the English language that isn't true.
>
> I'm afraid that's as silly as me declaring that there's only one correct
> parsing of English, and that's how *I* parse it.
No it's not that silly ;-) Maybe it's on the same level of silliness as
the concept of 'the Queen's English' (the idea being that the Queen 'owns'
the language and anyone else has to speak/parse as the queen does) as
you could consider that /usr/bin/perl 'owns' the language and that all
other perl processors better do the same thing as /usr/bin/perl or get
scoffed at down the local for talking funny...
Anyway, we're getting off topic. I was just saying that the reason we
can parse perl and not English is that though they are both type 0
grammars is that perl is defined by 'what /usr/bin/perl currently
parses' and we have *all* of that written down as the source code (though
not all of it produces expected results) where we don't have a definitive
list of the entire of English because that requires a *huge* degree of
cultural background information.
I'm sure there's a point here in replacing all Human -> computer speech
interfaces that use English as a command language to making everyone talk
perl, but this topic is getting silly enough.
Beer, Buffy, Beer, Buffy.
Later.
Mark.
(going back to writing HTML for NMS now)
--
print "\n",map{my$a="\n"if(length$_>6);' 'x(36-length($_)/2)."$_\n$a"} (
Name => 'Mark Fowler', Title => 'Technology Developer' ,
Firm => 'Profero Ltd', Web => 'http://www.profero.com/' ,
Email => '[EMAIL PROTECTED]', Phone => '+44 (0) 20 7700 9960' )
