[MUD-Dev] Text Parsing

[Chris Gray]

[Matthew Mihaly:]

> >My basic response here is: I disagree. Strongly. That's life, I guess!
> >The point behind making the input look like pidgin English is to make
> >life easier for those new to the MUD. If the entire world went by the
> >rule "if you can't do it perfectly then don't do it", we would still
> >be living in caves.
>
> Well, that makes sense, except that in my experience, unless you provide
> such a thing flawlessly, the users complain. The lack of consistency would
> probably make it far more maddening than having a parser that is less NLP
> oriented. I think that is what Caliban was pointing out.

Actually, I suspect that Caliban was deliberately posting flamebait.

Why do you believe that a parser that accepts pidgin-English-like input
would have to be inconsistent? I don't think mine is. In fact, I think
it is less inconsistent than those that have "unexpected" syntaxes and
minimum abbreviations. Again, I have never suggested anything like
Natural Language Parsing. All I have suggested is accepting input that
is structured like simple English commands. I've posted essentially
the entire algorithm used by my parser. I suspect its much simpler than
the algorithm used by many non-pidgin-English-like parsers.

This whole aspect of the parsing discussion is going nowhere. I think it
should be dropped in favour of constructive suggestions, and constructive
criticisms. And phrases like "NLP" should not be used, since they have
only been introduced in the negative sense.

--
Don't design inefficiency in - it'll happen in the implementation.

Chris Gray     cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA
               http://www.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA/cg/


_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev maillist  -  MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
http://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev