Kenneth Whistler wrote at 2:50 PM on Thursday, May 13, 2004: > >> > One normalization script could be used any number of times. Clip, >> >normalize, sort - repeat as necessary. >> >> Multiply that times the number of independent researchers and separate >> projects... > >... and you get a thousand different requirements, each of which >should be addressed with appropriate levels of programming tools.
... that are solved now by a single default process requiring no end user fiddling. >What gives you the slightest hope that *every* researcher's >particular needs for searching and sorting can be baked into >some *default* collation element weighting table? The whole point >is to provide a mechanism for people to *tailor* it as they choose >to meet *different* requirements. No, that is not the whole point - there is also the point that 90% of our work, which is done now by simple, default processes, would, all of a sudden, require custom tailoring. >By the way, Perl is God's gift to academic researchers. Perl, a write-only language ;-) >> Why make something we do all the time more difficult and non-standard, >> when what we do now works very well? > >Nobody plans to take away your rights and ability to continue >doing what you now do, if it works very well for you. Please, >sir, continue doing what you are doing with your current data. :-) It's incredible to me that you and others keep repeating this mantra, ignoring the fact (repeated for the nth time) that we will all be forced, in our separate research projects, to deal with MULTIPLE, COMPETING encodings. Respectfully, Dean A. Snyder Assistant Research Scholar Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project Computer Science Department Whiting School of Engineering 218C New Engineering Building 3400 North Charles Street Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 cell: 717 817-4897 www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
