RE: [MLUG] AI - any suggestions?

[Michael <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

> I think you're talking about "proper syntax" as a synonym for "proper
> grammar" in the prescriptive grammarian (school teacher) sense.  But
> that's not a very interesting point, since any intelligible dialect on
> the planet will have syntactic regularities that can be studied, written
> down, and used...up to a point.

That's another test I submit all my bots to. Can it understand both me and
normal people. If it can figure out what I'm trying to say it must be
doing a pretty good job afterall. :)

You can use certain rules but if your system breaks when people break
those rules you're going to be annoyed because as often as not people all
sound like me when they babble.

> Neither Basic nor COBOL nor SQL have underlying structures anything like
> English.  What they do have is some suggestive vocabulary and some very
> low level similarities in some cases to things like noun phrases.  The
> interesting thing about the so-called "English-like" languages is that
> they turn out to be not very good solutions to anything.  So, SQL is a
> horrible language for expressing many reasonable queries on relational
> databases, yet most office workers can't effectively use it at all.
> There is probably more "write-only" code written in (or around) the
> "English-like" Cobol than most other languages combined.

This is true though they do try to share some relationship with
English. Certain keywords and they try to make their syntax seem logical
in a common grammar sort of way. This isn't a bad idea but if you
structure a programming language based only on this idea it will be hell
for anything complex. That's why SQL is great for short queries and a
nightmare for complex queries. I've had database-design professors who
didn't even know SQL. At least SQL is better than point and click tools.

> Note that I don't have any good answers here.  But I do know what some
> of the nasty questions are. :-)

*shrugs* My answers won't work for everyone but they are learned from
years of experience messing with such things. It's always been my hobby to
do things in a fully incorrect method and make them come out better than
people who are following the correct methods. I've had no classes on most
crap I know but I've spent many many hours watching things fail, tweaking,
watching them fail again, etc until I found working solutions to such
nasty questions. :)

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