From degrenie@irisa.fr Thu May 24 17:30:49 2001 Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 19:03:48 +0200 From: Thomas de Grenier de Latour To: rae@lyx.org Subject: All the truth about boolean cats... > I'm looking for a package that would help me to write complex boolean > sentences, like "the cat is black or it is white and it eats mice" (it's > for a very technical paper about cats ;) without ambiguity. I think > about something like this: > > and > |- or > | |- the cat is black > | |- it is white > |- it eats mice > > Thomas de Grenier de Latour > Hi, I've seen I was quoted in the latest lyx news... Well, no matter, that's fun. But I want somebody in the world to know that I'm not crazy. You've quoted me, or signed the page, that's the same, so you will be the one who have the explanation. (Please, don't expect too much from that explanation, it is quite long just because today I've got time to waste. In particular, it is absolutly not a quantic physic story full of Schroedinger's cats wondering whether they are black or white or gray.) The paper is not about cats, it's about a formal semantic of the Java Card applets firewall, and is not mine but the one of the guy who shares my office room. The boolean rules he has to write can be terribly long and boring, so that the mathematical form needs a few explanations in a litterate english form, but this one is full of ambiguities because of the lack of indentation and parenthesis of this language. And because his english is even worth than mine. So we've thought about a tree form, without any knowledge of the way to do it in our favorite WYSIWYM word processor. So we've thought about the users ML... But what is really interesting is the choice of the stupid cat sentence to explain the problem. You must understand that there is not a lot of english teachers in France who have ever read a single line of Shakespeare. The best they have to learn to us is a few Beattles' songs and one or too stupid things about cats... - "The cat eats the mouse", and then you see 40 pupils who answer as a single voice: - "The mouse is eaten by the cat". - "Good, children, very good..." I don't remember any catless english grammar exercise before I was 18. - "The mouse run on ahead the cat", and all the pupils who are proud to answer: - "The cat run after the mouse", "hihihi" (a particulary stupid one is laughing at the idea that the cat will probably eat the mouse) - "Good, children, very good... The cat is not white, so..." - "The cat is black" (all other colors are for the second half of the year) And the worst is that I've forgotten every thing about the Beatles (I'm not even sure whether it takes one or two 't'), but I have so many cats in my head that every time I see an english word, I can feel the mouse trembling in my hand. For me, computer science is not a zero/one story, but is only a blackCat/whiteCat one. And a tree is only a thing cats can climb. - "The tree is climbable by the cat" - "Good children, very good..." And I try to work with this traumatic knowledge of english, in a world where you can't publish any serious work in french... See the result? I've wasted half an hour to write this, and you 5 minutes to read :) Good luck for your work on LyX, cats are watching you. -- Thomas.