Feature request: Path append operators for strings

H. S. Teoh hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx
Fri Jul 5 15:48:06 PDT 2013


On Fri, Jul 05, 2013 at 03:30:07PM -0700, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Friday, July 05, 2013 22:46:59 Namespace wrote:
> > On Friday, 5 July 2013 at 20:34:26 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
> > > On 07/05/2013 10:09 PM, Namespace wrote:
> > >>> Unary ~ is bitwise not in Java and D, and he is referring to
> > >>> binary usage.
> > >>> 
> > >>> [...] use ~ for _any_ purpose.
> > >> 
> > >> I'd expected that *any* really means *any* and do not refer to
> > >> binary.
> > > 
> > > Yes. Neither do 'use', 'for' and 'purpose'. Establishing that
> > > it is likely that ~ is referring to binary requires some more
> > > context (eg. it is likely that the two usages of ~ in his post
> > > refer to the same thing), common sense or the assumption that
> > > Jonathan probably knows about the unary usage. (Parsing natural
> > > language is quite hard though, so I could be wrong.)
> > 
> > Spoken like a true human Compiler. :)
> 
> LOL. Natural language is even more ambiguous than HTML, and we know
> how bad that can get. Every person is emitting and receiving slightly
> different versions of whatever natural language they're communicated
> in, and it's that much worse when it's pure text without body
> language. And that's with a _human_ deciphering it. It's a miracle
> that computers ever get much of anywhere with it.
[...]

Yeah, no kidding. Automated translation, which requires computer parsing
of natural languages, is egregiously bad, mainly because it's so hard!
Not only does every individual have a slightly different version of the
language, but often a lot of information is inferred from context and
cultural background, and context-sensitive parsing is a hard problem,
and cultural background is nigh impossible to teach a machine.

For example, consider the sentence "he's such an office Romeo!". It's
relatively easy to parse -- no convoluted nested subordinate clauses or
anything tricky like that. But it's extremely difficult for a machine to
*interpret*, because to fully understand what "office Romeo" refers to,
requires a cultural background of Shakespeare, the fact that he wrote a
play in which there was a character named Romeo, what the role of that
character is, what that implies about his personality, how that
implication about his personality translates into an office context, and
what it might mean when applied to someone other than said character.
How to even remotely model such a thought process in a machine is an
extremely hard problem indeed!

HTML is the role model of unambiguity by comparison!


T

-- 
Arise, you prisoners of Windows
Arise, you slaves of Redmond, Wash,
The day and hour soon are coming
When all the IT folks say "Gosh!"
It isn't from a clever lawsuit
That Windowsland will finally fall,
But thousands writing open source code
Like mice who nibble through a wall. -- The Linux-nationale by Greg Baker


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