Re: Ambiguity and disunification

From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Thu Mar 03 2005 - 16:00:43 CST

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    On 03/03/2005 20:16, Dean Snyder wrote:

    >Peter Kirk wrote at 8:11 PM on Thursday, March 3, 2005:
    >
    >
    >
    >>Documents which have been edited by many different people could
    >>very easily contain a mixture of hyphen/minus and hyphen
    >>
    >>
    >
    >Yes, my a prioris were that the document under discussion had a single
    >author who was consistent in usage. Other cases, like your mixed
    >assemblage scenario, are covered by my "cut and exchange" example in a
    >prior email.
    >
    >
    >
    OK. But your a priori is not satisfied by a significant proportion of
    actual documents. For example, a high proportion of all e-mails,
    including this one, contain quoted material which is generally not
    amended by the one quoting. More to the point, there is usually no way
    for an application to tell whether this is the case or not, except in
    rare cases of explicit authorship markup - the use of > as an e-mail
    quoting convention is certainly unreliable. So the only safe approach
    for a general purpose process is not to assume consistency.

    -- 
    Peter Kirk
    peter@qaya.org (personal)
    peterkirk@qaya.org (work)
    http://www.qaya.org/
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