--- Laurie Brown laurie@brownowl.com wrote:
David Freeman wrote:
All,
My web site has now gone alpha. So could I ask for people to take a look and let me know of any bugs, speiling misstakes etc... Also constructive criticism would be nice.
Before I get flamed for daring to speak the unspeakable, to whit: grammar and spelling *are* important, and that the results of trendy education methods and piss-poor teaching are a serious disservice to our young people, note:
I agree completely and admit that my english is crap. As for the education system, just don't get me started.
IMO, written English is no more difficult to master than any programming langauge, except that one doesn't need to compile English... Clear communication is no less important, however, and going public on a web site *requires* that it be at least close to correct. The sole reason so many youngsters can't spell or write, is down to the education system and crappy teachers, abetted by the acceptance of poor standards by the world at large. I wonder, for instance, how so many people get through tertiary education when they can't write to save their lives (we all know examples).
Again, I agree to the point I would say that a programming lnaguages and human lnaguages are very much the same sort of things but on different levels. Each has the sma e general constructs but under different terms, compare syntax and Grammer. Then add in correct spelling and a wide vocabulary, we have language. The problem comes from so much redundency which we add into the interpretation and thus make poor compilers. Take for example.
Chocolate me need. me need chocolate I require a cocoa based product with added milk and sucrose sumplement.
as you can see english has a lot of syntatic sugar, which isn't required for understanding to be had, this si where natural language processing comes in. Each sentence has verbs, adjectives etc... and the processor just processes the sentence for such words and treats them as objects. foe example the sentence "chocolcate me need" has the objects of me and chololate with the relation ship of "need" thrown in as "me" needing it. The problem we have is in our compilers or lexical analysis.
We will parse the sentence a number of times in attempts to make sense of it, if after an arbitary number of passes we decide it doesn't make sense we barf an error. Where Computer languages come into there own is that the language is very strict in the constructs which are allowed and the lexical analysis is somewhat poor (compared to a human). As such Programmers and hackers tend to command a better than average use of their native language through this need for above average levels of accuracy.
So to summerise, language has too much syntatic sugar which allows for interpretation from mal formed sentences where a Parse error whould be through. but through years of use we have go lasy and our interpreters have "improved" to the point that we no longer require such sytatic sugar and can use the language in a much reduced way.
To summerise, english is a robust language
to sumerise the summery of the summary: people are a problem.
Anyway, David, my initial comments: the site is so full of grammatical and spelling errors that it shouldn't be considered anything near ready for release. I'd suggest that if you have a problem with spelling, grammar and syntax, you get someone who hasn't to proof-read and correct it for you before you publish.
This is what I thought which is why it is alpha not beta. It may now be apparent why I use Bascule as a nick at times. Also the purpose of sending it to the list was for it to be proof read, and I am greatfull of your input on this.
I picked up the following on a quick read-through, certainly there are some I missed. Please don't ask me to do this again!
Thank you, I will get it into a high beta stage with as many mistakes as possible removed.
First para could do with a sprinkling of commas and/or colons/semi-colons as it has too many fragmented sentences: actually, this applies throughout the site. Additionally, there is a lot of random capitalisation of words, and many words uncapitalised when they should be. I stopped picking this up after a while.
Does any one know of a good site which explains the correct use of colons, semi colons and comas? Also what exactly is meant by fragmentation, word sometimes brings it up by I never knew what that means.
Thanks for the input, it is very helpful
Thanks
D
<snip my appaling spelling>
Cheers, Laurie.
Laurie Brown laurie@brownowl.com PGP key at http://pgpkeys.mit.edu:11371
===== -------------------- "We all know Linux is great... it does infinite loops in 5 seconds." Linus Torvalds
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/