Re: Does natural language skill translate to programming skill?


Ar an t-aonú lá déag de mí Márta, scríobh LEE Sau Dan:

"Aidan" == Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Aidan> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall . (Larry invented
Aidan> the language; his formal qualifications were in
Aidan> linguistics, but I’ve never seen a really satisfactory
Aidan> explanation of what aspect of it.)

I see. But Perl is the computer language with the ugliest (but
convenient) syntax. It's not context free (of course) nor LALR(1).
It is said that there is so far only 1 implemenation of the parser for
Perl. Nobody is ambitious enough to implement another, because the
grammar is so complicated.

No-one, to my knowledge, has yet managed to implement a complete parser for
any natural language--and the utility of such a thing would be limited, in
the absence of usefully-encoded lexicographic information. Which makes Perl
closer to natural languages in this than are most other computer languages.

For comparison, many AI reseach try to process natural language using
LISP or Prolog, whose grammars are so much more regular and simpler
than Perl.

Spamassassin, one of the few widely useful and deployed natural language
processing applications, was written entirely in Perl. I’m not aware of any
natural language processing applications written in Prolog or Lisp that have
served a useful purpose beyond a) absorbing research grant money or b)
proving that Prolog, Lisp and traditional computational linguistics
approaches are ill-suited to natural language processing.

--
On the quay of the little Black Sea port, where the rescued pair came once
more into contact with civilization, Dobrinton was bitten by a dog which was
assumed to be mad, though it may only have been indiscriminating. (Saki)
.

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