Feature request: Path append operators for strings

[TommiT]

On Saturday, 6 July 2013 at 22:25:59 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> 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.

You haven't read Ray Kurzweil's latest books then or you just 
don't think he's right?