Hi Richard, in a word... "I really enjoyed reading your post and I learned a lot!"
Larry----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard Gaskin" <ambassa...@fourthworld.com>
To: <use-livecode@lists.runrev.com> Sent: Monday, October 13, 2014 9:03 AM Subject: Re: problem with counting words
Good post, Kay. Each of the examples you provided is among the reasons I like xTalk.But even though they demonstrate useful features of the language, neither is dependent on xTalk's trait of counting quoted text as a single word when using the word chunk type.Perhaps I should preface this by noting that I very much enjoy xTalk in general and LiveCode in particular, a love that's only grown in my 27 years with this family of languages.But all programming languages have historical anomalies, and xTalk is not the world's only exception to this. Programming languages are, by nature, somewhat funky, attempting to communicate the richness of human thought to a machine too stupid to count past 1. All of them require trade-offs.In the first example you provided, the list of names, none of them includes quoted text. And even with the broader support of treating words as white-space delimited (breaking from the English rule of usually not including punctuation), as you noted at least one of the examples there will fail (sorry, Mr. Van Damme).Many other languages also provide means of dealing with multi-character white space (sed, awk, and Python come to mind), and none of them, not even xTalk, will reliably sort by last name unless we separate the first and last more explicitly, such in separate fields or with a tab character, as is commonly done in any language where a last-name sort is important, even in LiveCode.In the second example in which a multi-word value is used as an object identifier, once again we're not asked to parse that using xTalk's "word" chunk type, but instead get to rely on the engine's expression evaluator, which works very much like JavaScript's and others' in which literal strings can be used as object identifiers. Useful as it is, it's neither unique to xTalk nor necessarily dependent on how we use the "word" chunk type.Object identifiers *can* become dependent on the word chunk type if you need to parse them yourself, as others have noted along with many other good examples to justify the HyperTalk team's implementation (though we might ask why we need to do this so often, such as why we don't have objectType or ownerStack functions).No matter how useful the current implementation is, the choice still requires justification. Even if that justification is sound, favoring a certain utility, it's still a trade-off, the downside being a redefinition of the word "word" from its more common definition in natural language.Larry's initial confusion is far from rare. xTalk's reliance on a unique definition of "word" that differs from its use in natural language is something we all had to learn. We may accept it, we may like it, we may even prefer it, but it's by no means intuitive to the native English speaker.xTalk was born more than a decade before Unicode was invented, so it couldn't have taken advantage of the vast pool of collective knowledge embodied in the Unicode spec, nor was there the luxury of having the computational horsepower needed to use such a spec efficiently.Today the LiveCode team has at last corrected this with the introduction of the "trueWord" token type, though I have to shrug my shoulders with an acknowledging chuckle in sharing Larry's initial observation that if xTalk were being designed today, with it's ostensible emphasis on "English-like" syntax, the order is backwards:If we didn't have 27 years of code dependent on xTalk's unique redefinition of "word", to support the claim of "English-like" it might be more intuitive to have "word" act as "trueWord" does, and have some other token do what "word" currently does in xTalks unique redefinition.But that's not the world we live in. Like every other language, LiveCode is a product of its unique history. Useful as its conventions are, they will from time to time require us to learn new ways of doing things.This is just one of many reasons I generally don't use the phrase "English-like" when giving talks on LiveCode. Our favorite language brings to the world's programming choices a uniquely valuable blend of features, but while it's certainly more readable than most it isn't particularly "English-like", nor does it really even try all that hard to be.And that's a good thing.Natural language is really tough stuff to parse, full of its own even longer and more nuanced history, and intended for a very different audience (the cognitive complexity of the human mind rather than the logical simplicity of computers).I think most of us (except Geoff Canyon who has a rare mind for this sort of stuff <g>) would agree that we're all glad this isn't a valid statement in xTalk, even though it's a perfectly valid sentence in English:"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo> :) Kay C Lan wrote:On Mon, Oct 13, 2014 at 7:45 AM, Richard Gaskin wrote:I hear ya', but like so many other oddities in the language this one camefrom Apple,Sheer brilliance! One of the first analogies of HyperCard was that it was aan electronic rolodex. Here is a list of names: Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi Camilla Parker-Bowles Catherine Zeta-Jones Claude Levi-Strauss D'Arcy Corrigan Daniel Day-Lewis David Ben-Gurion Dodi Al-Fayed Florence Griffith-Joyner Gilbert O'Sullivan Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo Jean-Claude Van Damme Jimmy O'Dea Justine Henin-Hardenne Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Karim Abdul-Jabbar Kristin Scott-Thomas Maddox Jolie-Pitt Michael O'Leary Olivia Newton-John Peter O'Toole Sinéad O'Connor Tim Brooke-Taylor Ralph Twistleton-Wykham-FiennesSo lets say you want to sort these by surname - a kind of rolodex thing todo. sort lines of myListOfNames by word of -1 each will result in only one mistake sort lines of myListOfnames by trueword -1 of each --if you are on LC7.0 will result in basically the same messed up result most other programming languages will give you. Put it in and word processor and see how you go.Please feel free to try and write your own function that is more successful and more efficient than the beautiful one liner Bill Atkinson gave us. Evenif you had wordDel it wouldn't help much. I can't imagine the amount ofhours that have been wasted, especially on genealogical websites, trying tounfathom why double barrelled names never sort correctly. This is also compounded by the certain fact that some people will put a space betweenthe last given name and the Surname, some a tab, and some will 'format' thedata by placing multiple spaces in between names so that things 'line up nicely' - and are then confused as to why it only looks that way on theirscreen an not on someone else's. One of the reasons double barrelled names have picked up the '-' is to help computers recognise them as a single word.Also; put myVariable into fld Not A Variable doesn't work put myVariable into fld "Not A Variable" does. The ability to recognise words in quote as a single entity is extremely important. Yes, we don't typically think of such as a singleword, but when we understand that computers don't think like us, and we dounderstand why things are the way they are, such oddities can bemanipulated in many powerful ways to our own advantage. It is also helpfulwhen we understand such things that we don't go around replacing onecharacter willy nilly with another character. ~ [tilde] for instance is onecharacter I'd never use as it has a special meaning in many computer languages; as does / \ < > . * and many others. If we had some text that contained both straight and curly quotes and replaced the straight quoteswith curly quotes so we could get a word count, and then changed the curly quotes back to straight quotes, the finL text is not the same as it started- and this could cause problems. Today your function might work perfectlyfor today's problem, but next month, or next year, when you start expandingyour LC skills and try working with SQL databases, or Servers and network connections, every now and then someone will report a bug that your app does something strange. You may never be able to track it down because itjust happens that once every million DB calls a random user happens to usedata that contains a character that you never use yourself and thought no one else would. I have a particular liking to numToChar(127) myself. Yep, no other programming language might define a word like LC defines a word, but I for one am EXTREMELY thankful for that.-- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Systems Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web ____________________________________________________________________ ambassa...@fourthworld.com http://www.FourthWorld.com _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.comPlease visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
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