Re: text processing as *the* problem

["Ronald D Stephens" <address@hidden>]

Three quick points on recent discussions, lumped together in one post for brevity:

1. Dan Moniz wrote

""""In the case of Perl, I think it definitely headed in that direction, but I
would argue that it's somewhat unmanageable now, with several,
less-than-perfect features bolted on to it's original design. Perl 6 is a
massive rewrite. Similarly, Python is only now getting generators
("continuations lite") and what not, and there's a grand Python rewrite in
it's future as well (Python 3000)."""""

Actually, I do not think this is the case any more with Python. Guido has stated in posts on the newsgroup ( I certainly do not
recall his exact words) that Python will more likely now to evolve over time and one day, long from now, we'll wake up and realize
that "Python 3000" is here. This is also documented in Guido's foreword to the recently published "Programming Python" (O'Reilly's)
so it is his stated position. This was said after he moved to Zope a while back. I think the Zope folks prefer a more pragmatic
evolution, rather than a complete re-write from the ground up. Which could, IMHO, prove to be a very large blessing in disguise.
Perfectionists may differ, but I don't think Python needs any re-write from the ground up ;-))))
Let others plow that ground...

2. Also, someone asked a while back "what language is Google written in?" Well, according to a note on the Python official website,
that I went back and checked to make sure my memory was correct, Google is written, at least partly, in Python. The Python website
cited a link to a Slashdot article about Google as its source, but when I checked the linked article, I found folks discussing
Python as the langauge in which Google was written, in response to the article, but I could not find veroification in the article
itself to support this. So, I suspect it's true, but I do not know for sure.

3. Lastly


Oliver Steele wrote:

""""I've got a Python library that lets you do this: you can write
  if gre.match("adj* noun", tokens): ...
to match against a sequence of objects that have 'type' attributes with
values such as 'adj' or 'noun'.  (You can also compile an "adj* noun"
pattern strings into a DFA and use it later, or build a chart parser out of
a set of patterns, etc.)

Let me know if anyone's interested in beta testing this, and it will give me
an incentive to dust it off and finish documenting it.""""

I'd love to take a look at  this code. I am studying as many similar types of English language parsing code , written in Python,
that I can find.


Ron Stephens