On 06/09/2000 07:02:19 AM <alb@sct.gouv.qc.ca> wrote:
>À 09:58 2000-06-09 -0400, François Pinard a écrit:
>>Tom Garland <Tom.Garland@ireland.sun.com> writes:
>>
>> > TC304. Does anyone know if the following logical operators are
globally >
>> understood or must they be translated for each language?
>>
>> > AND
>> > OR
>> > ~ (not)
>
>[François]
>>There was a discussion on the Python list, last week, on the fact that
>these
>operators do not have a clear intuitive meaning, even in English.
I'm not sure I agree with François here. There are not Enlish words, but
logical operators, and anyone familiar with symbolic logic would know that
their meaning is defined in terms of truth tables, e.g.
A B AND
--------
T T T
T F F
F T F
F F F
>Many years ago, in a "natural-language"-to-data-base interface, just to
play (I
>know, it was vicious), I asked the following natural language sentence to
the
>program called "Intellect" (at the time, it was on an IBM mainframe): "How
many
>men and women are listed in the database?"... After many minutes going
trough a
>relatively big database, I got the single answer: 0 (i.e. ZERO)... (%=
[snip]
> it was not very
>clever programming... However how many users would believe what a machine
would
>answer in those occasions? Unfortunately most non-programmers, to whatever
>question.
>
>That is the problem I see. A big one. So yes, operators should be
translated,
>explained, and even presented to end-users with a tutorial explaining the
usual
>traps. This, even for English-speaking end-users. It is a matter of good
>user-machine interface. The user must be aware in advance of the kind of
>commitment he/she has contracted with the machine. So far we assume too
much on
>both sides (programmers and end-users), only the machine is
strightforward...
>"Garbage in, garbage out" is still quite of age.
Now this is a different matter, and I definitely agree with François here.
But this is talking about natural language words, not operators of logical
logic.
Peter Constable
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