From: Mitchell Koch <mitchell@...>
Date: 2006-08-10T14:41:05+09:00
Subject: Re: [QUIZ] Proper Case (#89)

* James Edward Gray II <james@grayproductions.net> [060809 22:02]:
> This is quite clever Mitchell.  Thanks so much for sharing it with us!
> 
> Sadly, I wrote the summary earlier today when I had a few free  
> moments.  Don't take it personally that it doesn't mention this  
> code.  :(

No worries. I shouldn't have put it off to the last minute anyway. :)

It's interesting to me that so few of us submitted code for this
quiz. It's a problem that has no clear solutions, partly because
capitalization isn't just about grammatical rules, but does
communicate unique things as hinted in Elliot's initial examples.  

For example if the word "gray" appears in a lowercase message, it
could mean the color in which it should actually be lowercase, or it
could be a surname, in which it should be capitalized.  A computer
reader has no way to know, a human reader should be able to tell, but
really only the original author knows for sure.

It's like image interpolation.  If I start out with a small photo,
expand it, and try to infer the extra pixels, a good algorithm will
give you something that looks okay, but it will not be as good as if
you started out by taking it at the larger size in the first place.

Incidentally, that's a good reason to not type in lowercase. ;-)

Mitchell Koch