Re: You tell me!

[Leslie Bialler lb136@xxxxxxxx]

Peregrine@xxxxxxxx wrote:

> Leslie B quotes Morris K and writes:
>
> > "What I would like to know has anyone written a program that will
> > convert first person into third person. Recently I had to change a 5
> > pages into third person and it was rather tedious."
> >
> > If you knew the third person was always he, all you need do is this:
> >
> > BX cva /I /he /Q2. But why write the program? Do it from the command
> > line and have done with it.
>
> That would work in many situations, I suppose, but I took Morris' question to
> mean he wanted to change all first-person contexts to third person -- such as
> "I am" to "he is" and "I thought" to "he thinks," etc.

Oh, I expect you're right. My apologies, then, to Morris. Clearly he wasn't a
prankster.
Anyway: This would require, not a word processing program, then, but a language
AI.

> Considering all
> possible regular and irregular verb conjugations, I'd say this is a job for
> an editor, not a program. Thank God we're not entirely obsolete!
>

Quite so! Perhaps, however, that man from YVR could write a cyberpunk novel about
this all.

"Rydell jacked into his Toshiba 6789X Wordwhiz. He raced past the spellchecker,
the thesaurus, and started looking for the irregular verbs. Soon, there it was
ahead of him, a black monolith. Serious ice here . . . " etc..



--
Leslie Bialler, Columbia University Press
lb136@xxxxxxxx
New Address:
61 W. 62 St, NYC 10023
212-459-0600 X7109 (phone) 212-459-3677 (fax)
> http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup