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From: Dave Lawrence
Newsgroups: sci.lang,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Syntactical *definition* of English
Message-ID: <1480@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU>
Date: 20 Oct 88 20:24:30 GMT
Sender: news@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU
Reply-To: tale@pawl.rpi.edu
Organization: The Octagon Room
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rob@pbhyf.PacBell.COM (Rob Bernardo) writes:
>ralphw@ius3.ius.cs.cmu.edu (Ralph Hyre) writes:
>+even stilted English would be enough for me. I just want to talk to my
>+Unix system in a more converstational manner, I have having the keystrokes
>+'ls -al' burned into my brain, wasting those valuable neural pathways.
>
>Let's see, if your UNIX system understood conversational English only,
>you'd have to say:
>
>    Give me a long listing of everything in the directory.

or, more accurately, you would have to tell it
     Give me a long listing (permissions, groups and all that good stuff)
  of every file in the -current- directory.
(unless you had a parser that understood implied words ...)

Wouldn't you just love to write the parser that could correctly handle,
in the English (not -American- (personal pet peeve) |:-) language the
equivalent of the following...

alias news-dates grep 'Date:' /usenet/spool/\$1/* |  sed 's/.*:.*: \(.*\)/\1/' | sed 's/^. / &/' | sort | sort -f -M +1 | sed 's/\(.* \)..:.*$/\1/' | uniq -c

Well, it might not look quite as bad, but I wouldn't say it to mum at 
Christmas dinner ....

Cheerio,
Dave
--
		   g l o r i o u sex i s t e n c e
EMAIL: tale@rpitsmts.bitnet, tale%mts.rpi.edu@rpitsgw, tale@pawl.rpi.edu