Feature request: Path append operators for strings

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 7/7/13 3:07 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
> 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.

But that applies to humans, too - they just have a much larger set of 
patterns they recognize. But they don't overlap perfectly for all 
humans. Try to ask your mailman whether a hash table is better than a 
singly-linked list for a symbol table.

Andrei