[seqfan] Re: Concatenation
Charles Greathouse
charles.greathouse at case.edu
Fri Apr 23 20:45:26 CEST 2010
Yes, precisely! There are times when I want to search for something
but either the terms cannot be searched, or else there are too many
possible ways they may be written.
& was suggested to me as another possibility that is sometimes used
for concatenation. So possibilities include &, +, //, U, ., a quoted
style, and concatenation itself. I've seen & in some programming or
scripting languages; JavaScript, at least, uses +; Perl uses .; the
others I don't know.
Tangent: It's also effectively impossible to search for J programs, as
I found when I tried to see what obfuscated command it uses for that.
And thank you, Robert, for that comment on Maple.
Charles Greathouse
Analyst/Programmer
Case Western Reserve University
On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 2:06 PM, Rick Shepherd <rlshepherd2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Good general(!) topic. Either items like this should be standardized or
> else a complete, updated list of "acceptable" synonyms should be easily
> accessible from "search hints" pages -- and/or maybe "canned searches"
> (i.e., saved, predefined searches) could be provided.
>
> Some things to be aware of:
> Anyone interested in finding sequences related specifically to some form of
> concatenation but doing a naive search (without using the keyword option)
> would find that searching for
> 1) // or "//" is the same as searching for " " (all 174,000+ sequences are
> returned now),
> 2) concatenate or concatenated or concatenating will each find (different)
> sequences,
> 3) concat (trying to find all those above at once) would return sequences
> that concatenate arrays of terms in vectors using, for example, that
> PARI function (and not necessarily dealing with sequences whose terms
> themselves are the results of concatenation), and
> 4) concatenat finds no matches
>
> (there's also potentially even "str1" + "str2," not even mentioning again
> the other synonyms that you've already found)
>
> Presumably other restrictions would normally be placed on one's searches too
> but our goals should still include making searching as simple and intuitive
> as possible. Standardization or maintaining lists of synonyms is a cost of
> that (or else relying on the individual users to find all the synonyms
> eventually themselves -- not that it's hard, just time-consuming).
>
> I know that the topic of concatenation is often not of interest as much to
> people with less interest in the keyword:base sequences but the general
> discussion about standardization of terminology and symbols to those *which
> can actually be searched for* easily is valid in any event. (Perhaps with
> the switchover to wiki format there will be additional search techniques
> with wildcards, regular expressions, etc.? ...but these would probably be
> more useful to some people than others....)
>
> Would it be reasonable to consider the eventual development of some
> automated process to replace synonyms with the designated preferred synonym
> in each case (with viewing to check or for human intervention to override in
> unusual situations) before each submission (spell-check, grammar-check,
> terminology-check,...)?
>
> Regards,
> Rick
>
>
>
> On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 12:07 PM, Charles Greathouse <
> charles.greathouse at case.edu> wrote:
>
>> Sorry, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. Essentially all of these
>> notations are defined before use, because none are common enough to be
>> known. I wrote the original message as a result of coming across //
>> and not remembering having seen it before, even though it seems to be
>> the most common of the various notations I outlined.
>>
>> Charles Greathouse
>> Analyst/Programmer
>> Case Western Reserve University
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 11:48 AM, Leroy Quet <q1qq2qqq3qqqq at yahoo.com>
>> wrote:
>> > It should be noted that I only sometimes use U (not my notation
>> originally). And even then, somewhere in the definition I always note that
>> this means concatenation.
>> >
>> > In my opinion, I don't care if there is a standard notation, just as long
>> as it is noted in the definition or comments that the notation used means
>> concatenation.
>> >
>> > Thanks,
>> > Leroy Quet
>> >
>> > [ ( [ ([( [ ( ([[o0Oo0Ooo0Oo(0)oO0ooO0oO0o]]) ) ] )]) ] ) ]
>> >
>> >
>> > --- On Fri, 4/23/10, Charles Greathouse <charles.greathouse at case.edu>
>> wrote:
>> >>...
>> >> Leroy Quet uses U for concatenation, as in A165784.
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