[alicebot-archcomm] Conditional wildcards

[Gary Dubuque]

This reminds me of the problems using underscore.  What if you add a
category that makes others not work?  Hopefully, conditional wildcards are
exclusive enough or are under <topic> or <that> filtering.  I don't know if
we can help if authors wish to make problematic solutions from just defining
the language standard.

Still considering it all,
  Gary Dubuque
  AIML problems maker

-----Original Message-----
From: alicebot-archcomm-admin@list.alicebot.org
[mailto:alicebot-archcomm-admin@list.alicebot.org]On Behalf Of Jonathan
Roewen
Sent: Saturday, March 01, 2003 2:08 AM
To: alicebot-archcomm@list.alicebot.org
Subject: Re: [alicebot-archcomm] Conditional wildcards


> I know the discussion of using things like regular expressions has been
> tried already.  The problem it solves is a necessary one.

I don't agree. Sure, it could make for an easy way of classifying a part of
the input string into a category during the match process, rather than
during the processing of the template contents, which I presume you feel is
too late.

Your example in another post, concerning dates, where the user says they are
10,000 days old, rather than stating it in a 'normal' fashion, and the bot
gets confused -- that is not an example of where regex would help. You would
still need to do processing in the <template>

All server-side scripting options I've seen in the various interpreters
support regex, so using regex in your <template> is possible with the
majority of available interpreters.

Here will be an issue you have not thought of: how this affects matching
precedence.

What if you have two categories, where the only difference is the
conditional regex on the same wildcard. What if both are possible matches?
How do you decide which to take? How do you order the categories, such that
on the same load order, the same category is always matched for the repeated
input?

That is most likely the biggest reason why regex in the <pattern> component
has not become standard.

Jon =)


_______________________________________________
alicebot-archcomm mailing list
alicebot-archcomm@list.alicebot.org
http://list.alicebot.org/mailman/listinfo/alicebot-archcomm