Re: hello

[Ray Catzel <computerpals@xxxx>]

I agree with all that Jeff has written. (The example sited was very good) 
There is one additional challenge: even those of us who have "done it before" 
very often forget. It is then desirable to have a archive-help mechanism to 
browse and find the problem area that we are focusing on. Maybe a form of 
"browser of the archive". 
cheers 
Ray Catzel 

--- Jeff Richardson <jeffr@xxxx> wrote: 
> Hello 
> I've just subscribed after reading the news on 
> logo-l 
> Reading the brief on the webpage, I thought of 
> another thing we might do; 
> build an archive of undocumented or 
> hard-to-find-or-figure-out traps for 
> young(and old!) players. Here's an example that I 
> struk in the past 24 
> hours: 
> I got an eMail from an upper primary school child. 
> He was building a MW 
> project using QUESTION. The idea being to have 
> something approaching 
> natural language processing.... 
> He struck what seemed like a bug in MW. 
> When the ANSWER to a QUESTION is more than one word, 
> like this: 
> QUESTION[who are you] ( and you type in ' i don't 
> know ') 
> ANSWER will return: 
> i don't know what to do with i dont know 
> Note that it is NOT a List. 
> When you try to use this ANSWER in an IF statement, 
> like: 
> IF ANSWER = [i don't know] 
> ...you'll get a FALSE returned. 
> But if you know enough to think of using LIST or 
> SENTENCE to try to 
> rectify this, say: 
> IF (SE ANSWER) = [i don't know] 
> ...you'll still get a FALSE, yet (SE ANSWER) will 
> return: 
> i don't know what to do with [i don't know] 
> 
> I eMailed the ever helpful Shawn Jesty at 
> info@xxxx 
> 
> The problem is that ANSWER is a character string, 
> not a bunch of WORDs as 
> it might appear..the spaces are characters. 
> The solution is to use PARSE. PARSE recognises the 
> spaces and uses them as 
> separators to turn a character string into a List. 
> So: 
> PARSE ANSWER = [i don't know] 
> returns TRUE. 
> 
> The reason I tell this story in detail is that this 
> sort of thing often 
> happens when pushing into the upper realms of 
> project construction, and 
> the documentation can sometimes lack the detail to 
> provide a solution. 
> 
> As Brian Harvey says, "the difference between an 
> expert programmer and a 
> non-expert is that the expert has seen everything 
> before". Once you've 
> encountered and solved these problems, whether 
> they're peculiarities of 
> the MW implementation, or algorithmic solutions(like 
> getting a turtle to 
> draw an ellipse), you'' know what to do next time. 
> And how to help someone 
> else who encounters the same problem...chances are 
> tho' that nearly 
> everyone doesn't solve these things for themselves, 
> they're helped by 
> someone else. Someone who has seen it before. 
> 
> I hope this archive can enhance that cultural 
> process. 
> 
> cheers 
> 
> Jeff Richardson 
> 
> 



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