On Sat, 20 Jan 2024, Greg Wooledge wrote: > On Sat, Jan 20, 2024 at 05:09:58PM -0000, Curt wrote: >> On 2024-01-19, David Wright <deb...@lionunicorn.co.uk> wrote: >>> On Fri 19 Jan 2024 at 17:25:10 (+0000), debian-u...@howorth.org.uk wrote: >>>> Greg Wooledge <g...@wooledge.org> wrote: >>>> >>>>> I won, and you lost >>>> >>>> There shouldn't be a comma in that sentence, in English. There is in >>>> the closely related expression "I won, you lost." >>> >>> That's rather proscriptive. "I won and you lost." and >>> "I won, and you lost." are two different sentences. >>> >> >> AFAIK, "you lost" is an independent clause and should be separated from >> the independent clause that precedes it with a comma before the >> coordinating conjunction. > > Regardless of which grammar rules are right, wrong, or optional, the point > of this is that parsing natural language text is *stupidly difficult*. > A person who has to ask why "grep -c" doesn't count the number of commas > in a single line of text probably isn't able to take on this quest. > > Any serious inquiries about natural language parsing should be directed > to an appropriate artificial intelligence mailing list instead of this one. >
mr wooledge makes a valid point if an ignorant person such as myself tries to parse his advice i get unless you're a super brilliant egghead you shouldn't bother to try
