Re: [lojban] Merry Effing Christmas, Lojbanistan

[Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org>]

On Sun, Jan 02, 2011 at 11:35:54AM -0500, Michael Turniansky wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 10:40 AM, Robin Lee Powell
> <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
> > On Sun, Jan 02, 2011 at 10:34:35AM -0500, Michael Turniansky wrote:
> >
> >> Well, obviously, to make a brash statement like that without
> >> having actually SEEN the files involved is just blowing smoke.
> >> But MUMPS' string handling capabilities are extremely powerful,
> >> since they are its only data type.  90 minutes was almost
> >> certainly an exaggeration, but I wouldn't be surprised if it
> >> took me significantly less time than it did you.
> >
> > String handling wasn't the issue at all; this was in Perl, for
> > one thing, which is about as good at string handling as
> > anything, I should think.
> >
> > The *VAST* majority of the time (> 90%) was spent making by-hand
> > changes to the files so they could be matched up properly; the
> > two documents had drifted greatly before I tried to transfer the
> > index from one to the other.  The script itself only took me a
> > couple of hours; it's only 300 lines.
> >
> > Feel free to come visit #lojban on IRC if you'd like to see the
> > files.
> >
> > If there was a genuinely faster way to do this, I'd love to
> > learn it.
> >
> > -Robin
> 
> ISTM that if you spent 18 hours making hand corrections to a
> document in order to be able to index it, it would have taken you
> less time than that to hand index it.  

That was with only paying half attention, at best.  Most of the
people who have looked at the problem guess that it would take about
a minute of concentrated attention per index entry.  There are 5,000
of them.  So, 80 hours minimum.

You're *more* than welcome to do a by-hand review of the results,
though, if you think you can do it much faster.  :D

-Robin

-- 
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