Feature request: Path append operators for strings

[Walter Bright]

On 7/5/2013 3:48 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> 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!

Human speech is also littered with sarcasm, meaning reversal (that's one nasty 
car!), meaning based on who you are, your social status, age, etc., meaning 
based on who the recipient is, social status, age, etc.

Etc.

I can see machine translation that is based on statistical correlation with a 
sufficiently large corpus of human translations, but I don't see much hope for 
actual understanding of non-literal speech in the foreseeable future, and I'm 
actually rather glad of that.