Skip to main content

First Project (First Iteration)

NOTE: Major error in the dictionary -- plural forms identified as singular.  (12/30/17, 8:10 PM)

This is the first version of my first project.  The overall goal would be to create a fully functional application that can parse any Latin verb the user enters.  This represents my first baby steps towards that goal.  Here is the code:
stems = {
"o" : "first person singular",
"as" : "second person singular",
"at" : "third person singular",
"amus" : "first person singular",
"atis" : "second person singular",
"ant" : "third person singular",
} 
def parse(verb):
    stem = verb[len("am"):]
    try:
        return(stems[stem])
    except:
        print("Verb form not found.") 
while True:
    entry = input("Enter a Latin verb: ")
    if parse(entry) != None:
        print(parse(entry))
Right now, the parser has pretty severe limitations.  It will only parse singular present active indicative forms of the verb "amo".  I've set up a dictionary to recognize all of those forms.

The main idea for the app is to take the user entry, split it into root and stem, then search for the entry corresponding to that stem in the dictionary.  One question for the final form would be whether I would want to make the dictionary sensitive to different roots or just focus on stems.  Probably if the app can just find the stem, it doesn't have to know anything about the root.  If it finds no stem, it will return an error.

Since there are several forms of conjugation in Latin (e.g. first conjugation, second conjugation), I might want to consider whether to have separate dictionary for each conjugation, where the app is able to determine which conjugation to look in.

Sometimes the conjugation is ambiguous -- in that case, I would want to be able to program the app to print all relevant entries.

How does the app work right now?  First, the user enters something, hopefully a form of the verb "amo."  The app calls a function, parse(), using the entry as its argument.  It pretty much assumes that it is looking for the stem of the verb "amo" -- I did this by having it define stem as everything from the end of that root (from string position 3, in other words).  It then uses stem as a key to look up the verb form in the dictionary.  If it finds the verb form, it returns the entry -- otherwise, it alerts the user that nothing was found.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's a Date

I guess I should really be putting these things up in GitHub.  The way I see it, the coding journal is just a place to share the code I write or study along with any notes I have about it.  It's sort of a documentation LiveJournal, if you will. Anyway, this is a "study" for my project idea: create an app that will prompt the user for two dates, then calculate the difference between them. The burden of this study is twofold: (1) convert dates in standard American form (e.g. December 15, 1993) into dates in standard American numeric form (e.g. 12/15/1993); (2) create a numerical representation of the date. To process the date, I started with a list of the months.  I then used a loop to create a dictionary that would attach a value to each month. Next I had to parse the user entry (I haven't added any debugging for incorrect entries yet). I did so by splitting the entry into "raw" data.  I used my dictionary to process the month name into a number, str...
Post a Comment
Read more

Nailing Down The Meaning Of "This" In JavaScript

Sense-certainty itself has thus to be asked: What is the This? If we take it in the two-fold form of its existence, as the Now and as the Here, the dialectic it has in it will take a form as intelligible as the This itself. To the question, What is the Now? we reply, for example, the Now is night-time. To test the truth of this certainty of sense, a simple experiment is all we need: write that truth down. A truth cannot lose anything by being written down, and just as little by our preserving and keeping it. If we look again at the truth we have written down, look at it now, at this noon-time, we shall have to say it has turned stale and become out of date.   Hegel,  Phenomenology of Spirit  S. 95 Overview In philosophy, English words like "this" are referred to as indexicals, with the implication that (A) they are used to point at something and (B) what they point at is determined by context (just as, when I point at someone, who I am pointing at is determined ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Throughput, Latency, and Pipelines: Diagnosis Of A Fallacy

Source here . Latency is the time it takes for a job to complete from start to finish -- for example, if we're downloading a file from a server, we might define the latency of the download as the amount of time it takes from the initial request for the file to the time the last byte is received. Throughput is a measure of how much can be completed in a given time.  Following the same example, how many files could we download in an hour? What is the relationship between latency and throughput?   It make take, again, 1 hour to download a file.  Notice already that we have a relationship between some amount of work that can be completed and time -- if the file is, say, 2 GB, it takes 1 hour to download 2 GB in our example.  What we really want to do here is generalize: how long does it take to download 10 GB?  How many GB can we download in ten hours or one minute?  Generalizing over time, we derive latency; generalizing over work completed, we derive the...
Post a Comment
Read more