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Could Pharo be more idiot-proof?

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Peter Kenny

Could Pharo be more idiot-proof?

I have just done something stupid, so this is just letting off steam (and maybe looking for someone else to blame!).

I have been playing with Moose (version 4.8), mainly because I want to experiment with PetitParser. I am struggling a bit, but getting somewhere I think. I have been trying out a lot of snippets in a workspace, before getting down to producing proper code. In a fit of madness, thinking I was closing a debugger window, I closed the workspace window. It looks as though I have lost the contents, though I can probably reconstruct them from the changes file. My main Smalltalk experience is with Dolphin Smalltalk, and there, if you try to close a workspace, it asks if you want to save the contents first. Could Pharo have something similar? - or am I the only idiot to do this?

As a supplementary point, I am trying to use PetitParser to parse natural language. From the examples it is clear that PP is designed with formal languages in mind. Am I wasting my time using it on natural languages? Has anyone else tried this?

Thanks for any advice

Peter Kenny

Sean P. DeNigris

Re: Could Pharo be more idiot-proof?

Administrator

Peter Kenny wrote

It looks as though
I have lost the contents...

Open another workspace, click the triangle on the right side of the title bar, then select "Previous contents…" from the menu and choose the one you closed accidentally

Cheers,
Sean

Daniel Lyons

Re: Could Pharo be more idiot-proof?

In reply to this post by Peter Kenny

PBK Research writes:
> As a supplementary point, I am trying to use PetitParser to parse natural
> language. From the examples it is clear that PP is designed with formal
> languages in mind. Am I wasting my time using it on natural languages? Has
> anyone else tried this?

What are you trying to do with natural language? Do you have highly
regular input and a somewhat restricted domain? I have used Prolog DCGs
to mess around with this kind of thing, and if you have a lot of control
over the input and your expectations you can make progress with a tool
for formal languages, but if you want to do something sophisticated or
support arbitrary inputs, you're probably wasting your time.

--
Daniel Lyons

Peter Kenny

Re: Could Pharo be more idiot-proof?

Daniel

Thanks for the comments. I have tried Prolog too, but didn't get very far. I
am hoping to deal with pretty arbitrary inputs (typically news stories from
internet newspapers etc), but initially just searching for key words and
phrases. So far I have used PP to construct a pretty good tokeniser to
identify words, sentences, punctuation etc, which was not very difficult. It
may be that I won't get very far, but I'm retired and I do this for fun, so
what the heck.

Peter Kenny

-----Original Message-----
From: Pharo-users [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of
Daniel Lyons
Sent: 03 February 2014 18:52
To: Any question about pharo is welcome
Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Could Pharo be more idiot-proof?

PBK Research writes:
> As a supplementary point, I am trying to use PetitParser to parse
> natural language. From the examples it is clear that PP is designed
> with formal languages in mind. Am I wasting my time using it on
> natural languages? Has anyone else tried this?

What are you trying to do with natural language? Do you have highly regular
input and a somewhat restricted domain? I have used Prolog DCGs to mess
around with this kind of thing, and if you have a lot of control over the
input and your expectations you can make progress with a tool for formal
languages, but if you want to do something sophisticated or support
arbitrary inputs, you're probably wasting your time.

--
Daniel Lyons