Hi, Vernon.
Can I say that any particular "letter" is supposed to have the same value
always?
Or can any particular "letter" have different values according to various
contextual considerations?
If the latter, I will need to have the "contextual considerations"
specified.
I'm going to start thinking about this in logical form for the purpose of
writing up the code. I'll confess that I'm not a GUI kind of programmer,
and that what I'll be writing will be a command line executable. However,
I will code it in such a way that various parameters can be specified,
and values altered at will, but the user simply typing the values into a
text file which will then be the parameter values used by the console
application program when it is run. (For Windows programmers, this text
file would be an INI type of file.)
I'm not sure yet how to specify "terminators." I'm thinking of
terminators as something that designates the end of the sequence of
characters that are being used to calculate a value. Of course, the
text that is fed into the program can be modified at will by the user
for the purpose of adding in an arbitrarily chosen character designated
as a terminator, such as, say, a tilde character. The program could
then just be coded in such a way as to produce values of each of the
character sequences between each terminator.
To make things simpler (for coding), other alphabets could simple be
"mapped" to the English alphabet (ASCII characters) in some arbitrary
fashion, and so the user would still specify values for English letters
in a table used in the configuration file, but the letters in this case
would not really correspond to English letters for English words but
would correspond to whatever non-English letter they are "standing in"
for. Of course, whatever mapping like this is used must also be applied
to the text that is to be fed into the program. (I've never coded for
Unicode and anything outside of business data processing applications
right in the U.S., so I've never had to think about considerations of
dealing with non-English languages and text. Perhaps there is a simpler
way of doing this that I just don't happen to know anything about.)
These are just some of my initial thoughts as I start thinking about
coding this.
Of course, as I stated before, all code I write would be open, and
released to public domain. And I'm not going to try to figure out the
specific calculation logic. That's the job of you and others who are
delving into it. My job is simply to determine from you what the
logic is specifically enough for me to code it.
Regards,
Todd S. Greene
tgreene@usxchange.net
###### Vernon Jenkins, 7/9/01 7:56 PM ######
Hi Todd,
I have set up a page which specifically addresses your proposal. Let me
know what you think, and whether you wish to proceed.
Here is the URL: http://homepage.virgin.net/vernon.jenkins/protodd.htm
Regards,
Vernon
Todd S. Greene wrote:
>
> Hi, Vernon.
>
> Tell you what. I will meet you halfway. Professionally, I'm a computer
> programmer, and my language of choice is C++. If you will draw up the
> algorithm in logical form and present it to me, I will write the C++
> code for it (going for "compatible code" that can be compiled on
> platforms other than just Win32 platforms) and offer this up for people
> to compile and run on their own systems. They can then run all kinds of
> texts through the algorithm and then we will know what the results are
> of this algorithm.
>
> Then we won't have to talk about unverified hypothetical probabilities.
> We'll be talking about actual cases and actual results, and there won't
> be any possibility of the "shell game" principle.
>
> Regards,
> Todd S. Greene
> http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Thebes/7755/
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