Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Peter Kirk" <Peter_Kirk AT sil.org>]

Software programmers (I was one once!) are used to parsing texts, such as
programming languages and also documents encoded in standards such as XML,
according to the published specifications, which in this case are that a
line in the original is terminated by "?". They are also used to treating
white space in the input text, including new lines, as insignificant or
always equivalent to a single space. The way in which my SIL colleague
programmed this feature was precisely correct. The problem was only with the
text, which did not match the published specification.

Peter Kirk

-----Original Message-----
From: Henry Churchyard [mailto:churchh AT usa.net]
Sent: 16 November 2000 15:22
To: Biblical Hebrew
Subject: Re: Conversion of OTA BHS text

<snip>

That's a very good thought.  I threw out all the "?" characters in the
very first step of processing the BHS text for my dissertation, so I
kind of forgot about "?"  (it certainly never occurred to me that
anybody would write a software program in such a way that the presence
of the "?" characters is critically necessary to successfully process
the text, since these characters do not mark any feature of the
manuscript L/B19a, and do not represent any meaningful or ancient
characteristic of the Biblical text either).

<snip>

So the SIL software may not be technically buggy -- but if it vitally
depends on an absolutely correct placement of "?" markers (which in
fact does not seem to have been present in the majority of the
versions of the BHS e-text over the years), then I would say that it is
somewhat finicky and persnickety (the opposite of "robust").

--
Henry Churchyard   churchh AT usa.net   http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/