The questions are in plain text because it's (very) legacy
data.
At this moment my developers are currently leaning toward
making the maintainers of questions use a tailor-made
markup; as the dba, I was hoping to ride to the rescue
yelling "but wait - there's no need to go to all that
hassle since Perl can seamlessly translate the question on
the fly!".
Lingua::EN::Inflect got me part of the way there - an already
existing markup syntax & decoder would carry a lot of
weight - but without
a 2nd=>3rd person verb translation tool I'm stuck.
Sounds like a fun module to write, but I'm one
of the last guys you'd want writing a Lingua::EN module. :-)
Since I'm one of the few Perl proponants at my company, I
probably won't win the fight to have CGI generate the pages,
and thus a nice perl syntax for the markup (like
$to_be{first}{singular}{present}) probably won't
happen.
I agree English is contorted - check out the exceptions
Damian mentions in his module & it's hard to argue the man
isn't a saint for such an extraordinary job.
(Yup, this does sound like a homework question, but it
isn't. We do ask-a-nurse telephone triage, and we're
moving to having the
patients triage themselves via the web. Presentation means
a lot, or so I'm told.)
Thanks, everybody. Your help is appreciated. | [reply] |