Confusing automated translators.

[Christos TZOTZIOY Georgiou]

On 15 Jul 2003 10:24:17 -0400, rumours say that Francois Pinard
<pinard at iro.umontreal.ca> might have written:

>Automated translators which ignore punctuation are pretty fragile, too.

There is also the old story of the Oracle at Delphi (and *that* is
indeed related to Python, see
http://www.tylwythteg.com/delphi/delphi.html :), which owed much of its
success to the dubiousness of the predictions (nobody could prove the
prediction wrong); a good example of needed punctuation was the one that
meant either
"you will go, you will come, you won't die at war"
or
"you will go, you won't come, you will die at war"

In ancient Greek that was because of the negation "ou", which being
between the second and third subsentence, could be attributed to either
one; it was valid greek either way.
-- 
TZOTZIOY, I speak England very best,
Microsoft Security Alert: the Matrix began as open source.