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Postings from December 2003
On Tue, 2003-12-02 at 07:28, Abhijit Menon-Sen wrote: > At 2003-12-01 17:50:32 -0600, whatever@davidnicol.com wrote: > > > > This operation was termed "translation" by some whimsical software > > engineer deep in the mists of long-ago, due to the functional > > similarity between the operation of tr(1) and the activity of > > translating language by looking up words in a bilinugal dictionary. I took latin in junior high and I remember this algorithm for doing homework: 0: bookmark glossary in textbook 1: identify latin word 2: look up latin word in dictionary 3: write down english word 4: end-of-homework or goto 1 This maps directly into the operation of tr(1): 0: create dictionary from arguments 1: identify input character 2: look up input character in dictionary 3: write down output character 4: end-of-string or goto 1 > Er, did you mean to say transliterate instead of translate? If so, then > the rest of your message makes no sense, because there is no similarity > between the operation of tr(1) and looking up words in a dictionary. If > not, then your message still makes no sense, because the operation was > never termed translation in the first place. man tr on the system I am using claims that tr is "translate" > I don't understand the argument anyway. My copy of the OED defines the > word transliterate as «To replace letters or characters of one language > by those of another used to represent the same sounds; to write (a word, > etc.) in the characters of another alphabet.» Transliteration implies this same-sound thing. tr does not have anything to do with sounds in different alphabets. If you use tr to implement a reversible single substitution cipher like so: tr/a-zA-Z0-9/0-9A-Za-z/ you're not pretending that there is a written language where zero sounds like little ay. Tr creates a "dictionary" mapping and "translates" the string, character for character, just like a dissatisfied seventh-grader doing their latin homework (with extreme disregard for the subtleties of latin grammar.) > Or are people just forgetting that "language" is also a term stolen from > linguistics and given a specific meaning by computer science? :-) > > -- ams Or that reality is a metaphor for Go? -- david nicol "I'll be working, working; but if you come visit I'll put down what I'm doing: my friends are important" -- David Byrne