Feature request: Path append operators for strings

[Walter Bright]

On 7/7/2013 1:30 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 7/7/13 1:26 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 7/6/2013 11:11 PM, TommiT wrote:
>>>> 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.
>>>
>>> You haven't read Ray Kurzweil's latest books then or you just don't
>>> think he's
>>> right?
>>
>> Spend a little quality time with Siri. I did, and discovered it was
>> hardly any better than Eliza, which is a few lines of BASIC written in
>> the 1970's.
>
> Ow come on.

All Siri does is recognize a set of stock patterns, just like Eliza. Step out of 
that, even slightly, and it reverts to a default, again, just like Eliza.

Of course, Siri had a much larger set of patterns it recognized, but with a bit 
of experimentation you quickly figure out what those stock patterns are. There's 
nothing resembling human understanding there.