For me, at least, the issues I raised have less to do with morality than practicality (sorry to all you upvoters
who thought I was making a grand anti-censorship
speech :-)
Parsing the English language is an
extremely difficult task to automate,
regardless of your motive or objective.
Unless you are using key words that are
unlikely to be used in conversation unrelated to what
you're trying to capture, you'll end up with bogus
results unless you can also analyze and interpret context.
Even humans don't do so well at that -- hence the use of
"magic words" like "mayday" or
"I am declaring an emergency" instead of
"help" in situations where it really matters.
Trying to code this sort of understanding into a perl
regex without resorting to predefined magic words would
be quite a trick.
Automating action based on anything a perl regex could
identify simply won't do you much good in the long run. | [reply] |
Even humans don't do so well at that -- hence the use of "magic words" like "mayday" or "I am declaring an emergency" instead of "help" in situations where it really matters.
<pedantry>
Unless you're French
</pedantry>
You've got a good point though, really - the mayday call as a whole is quite formalised. "x souls on board" and so on.
Recall, though, the recent US air crash where the pilot ran out of fuel but didn't declare an emergency - in spite of the tower asking him if he wanted to! Having such a specific form of words acted in this case as a disincentive - he didn't want to be seen to be in serious trouble.
andy.
ObPerl: erm, print map {$_ x3} split //, ".-."
| [reply]
[d/l] |