Syllabic division of words

[Randall Reetz]

I have no sudden need for syllabic extraction.  It would be interesting, following your logic to ask mid 18th century people if they had a need for a personal computer or digital network.  Most people can't see past the widgets in front of them.  Thank god for the weirdos like bill atkinson who work towards what should be instead of what is. Do you really think there is something with more potential impact on the future of computing then effective meaning and natural language processing?  Do you imagine that I am interested because I want to put dots between syllables in some wacky personal dictionary re-invention waste-of-time hobby project in my wood-paneled den (after my train set and battle of nomandy miniatures are completed)?  Meaning processing has the potential to change everything.  If the blocks we all have in our creative little hands can self assemble into living breathing meaning machines (understanding not just executing instructions), the whole world changes in ways previous technology and infrastructure (plumbing, electricity, radio, rail, gas engines, powered flight, even programmable computation) were but small hills in comparison.

I have written simple stochastic parsing schemes that give me salient topic information about any text I throw at them.  How much better my meaning abstractions would be if I had access to more info than which strings sat between space characters.

Us old folk have a tendency to cast computing in binary absolutes, we look to applications that give a single answer that can be cast easily as other correct or the result of a bug.  But meaning is much fuzzier than arithmetics.  We are intimate with this fuzziness... It is how our own computers (brains) work.  Even so, we often reject computation that flirt and struggles with truth at levels of complexity that real systems of any interest exhibit.

There is a whole world of possibilities beyond the absolutist horizon of our own rather limited computational history.

What would be as revolutionary today as hypercard was twenty some years ago?

randall     

-----Original Message-----
From: Sarah Reichelt <sarah.reichelt at gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, August 21, 2009 4:16 PM
To: How to use Revolution <use-revolution at lists.runrev.com>
Subject: Re: Syllabic division of words

On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 5:49 AM, Randall Reetz<randall at randallreetz.com> wrote:
> This should be a standard function in any xtalk environment.


This sort of comment comes up every now  then and always makes me
laugh, no matter what feature it is referring to.

Rev has enormous flexibility, so we all use it in very different ways.
We all run into things that we want as part of the language, but you
have to consider the return on investment for RunRev. I have been a
member of this list for more years than I care to remember, and the
HyperCard list before that, and this is the FIRST time I have ever
come across anyone wanting syllabic division.
There is no way that RunRev would see this as a worthwhile allocation
of their resources and I for one would be extremely irritated if such
a specialised request got their attention, when there are basic
features that we all would use that still need to be implemented.

So by all means ask for help on the list, but don't assume that
something should be part of the language, just because you have a
sudden need for it.

Regards,
Sarah
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