A very productive day using FORTH

Hi,

today I had a success with Forth in an area where one usually would
not expect it.
Problem was to analyze a big database of linguistic data, represented
in XML and custom SGML-like representations. The database contains
texts, translations and grammatical analysis data + some meta data.
The current data is perfectly repesentable in a tree. But the analysis
to be done would not be tree like - so a solution was needed how to
represent this. Big part of the problem was that it's a research
project where you do not even exactly know how data would be best
represented.
My idea last week was to give Forth a try - basically to assume each
word in the texts has an own life and the texts are "Forth programs".
Today we tried it. So we first formed some example texts to examine.
The problem number one was to find a nice representation, that was
done easily. Next problem was what a "word" has to do by default. We
also found this and where able to make our first statistics. Step by
step we enhanced the thing by prepending to the texts the questions we
had. Some things where a little more complicated but most questions
where programmed in seconds.
Best of all was that I step by step explained the linguist what I did
and we talked a lot about Forth in general - now she wants to learn
Forth to do at least simple questions by her own.

Conclusion is that Forth is very usable for linguistic research tasks.
The problems we had, turned out to be easily implementable. Even non-
programmers seem to be able to follow the logical steps if you explain
them well - Forth is with its simplicity very nice while you explain
what you are doing.
The basic framework we used was about 20 lines of Forth code. In about
5 hours of intensive work we implemented things that would have taken
months of work if it where done in the usual way the institution
offers for such requests.

Has anyone else used FORTH for linguistic research tasks?

-Helmar

.

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