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The dragon gender issues were worsened by Avernum.

Addendum: pasting the data into pico also worked, it just took about 15 minutes for terminal to handle the paste. The More You Know... :-D Thanks again to both of you so much -- this has saved me a huge amount of work. Also, this program will be very useful the next time Jeff releases a game that I care about that has a legible definitions file! mwahaha...

Got it to work again! The culprit was MacOS text formatting (about line breaks, I'm guessing) that TextEdit seems to forcibly put on files it saves, even if they did not begin with MacOS formatting. Using TextWrangler instead saved the day. (Pasting 800k of characters into pico did *not* work. )

Okay, new problem. It works FANTASTIC on small test files. My actual table in question is 55 columns by 1812 rows. When I use that file (including several attempted reformats to make sure there were no weird characters or anything) the program only works partially. It will copy the entire file, as far as I can tell, to the output file, and it will get rid of an empty cells (i.e., two tabs in a row -- I did change the constant to tab). But it won't change the order of cells otherwise. Any thoughts on how I can troubleshoot this?

Okay, apparently the OS X terminal is a bit weird with file paths. Now I can run the program, but I get this: Code: Macintosh-3:~ slartucker$ /Users/slartucker/testniemand||^CMacintosh-3:~ slartucker$ /Users/slartucker/testniemand testin testout||||||^C I assume that the pipes are related to the program and that something about the I/O isn't working quite right, any thoughts? EDIT: Whoops -- success! That was the program running. It just reads in from the command prompt and not from files. Okay, let's see if pasting 1800 lines is going to overflow the terminal buffer.... EDIT #2: Whoops, Dintiradan's < and > to the rescue. You guys rock. This makes me life so much better. Thank you both so much!

Thanks to you too, Dintiradan! I somehow missed the delim and prefix declarations entirely. Whoops. Yeah, that would answer that question! g++ was EXACTLY the help I needed -- I was using gcc before and couldn't get it to compile in terminal. (Xcode would compile it, but with no window or terminal, so that was useless.) Now I get the following errors (an improvement at least). Any ideas? EDIT: Okay, that was silly of me. Forget the previous errors. g++ seems to be compiling it successfully but I can't do anything with the resulting output file, which I would expect to be an executable, right? Code: Macintosh-3:~ slartucker$ g++ niemand.cpp -o testniemandMacintosh-3:~ slartucker$ Macintosh-3:~ slartucker$ testniemand-bash: testniemand: command not foundMacintosh-3:~ slartucker$ testniemand testin testout-bash: testniemand: command not found

Whoa. Thanks, Niemand! A few questions, if you're still interested: 1) For when I attempt to compile this: what language is it? I recognize some bits as C, but there are other bits that don't look like C, or at least not the incarnations of C I was once familiar with. 2) Where does it read in from? In other words, do I feed it a text file somehow, am I expected to paste the table into a console window, or what? 3) Is it usable with any standard delimitation (e.g, tab-delimited (current format), CSV, or whatever) or do I need to convert to spaces and pipes? Correspondingly, I see the use of whitespace in the code; does that mean spaces within cells with text string contents (because there are some) will break it?

Clarification: I should add that not all of the cells/labels exist in every row. For example, there might be a row that just doesn't have an "ID: zz" cell -- that row should just have an empty cell in the "ID" column. So a simple sort of cells within the row won't work, either.

I have a table. Each row of the table has the correct contents for its row, but the columns do not all have the correct contents for their column. However, each cell's contents begin with a label for the correct column. For example, the first column is "CREATE" and every single row has a cell that reads "CREATE: xx" or "CREATE: whatever"... as it happens, those are all in the first column. But for the other columns, the component cells are scattered: thus if the third column is "ID" various rows might have a cell that reads "ID: 23" in the second column or "ID: 35" in the fifth column. The table is very large (about 1800 rows) so sorting by hand is not a good option. Obviously this task CAN be accomplished much faster and without trouble by a computer. But I can't find an easy way to do this. Short of writing my own code to do it, which in my case would be no better than sorting by hand, does anyone know of a nice shortcut that will take care of this for me?

Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel When I first saw this topic, I launched A6 (for the first time ever) ... you have no interest in the game, but you'll run it to test right-clicking?

Originally Posted By: Master1 ...a number of the professors act as advisors. It depends on the college how you're assigned. My mom is an advisor for incoming students since she teaches a first-year seminar. She helps students register for classes and so on. After you declare your major, you get an advisor from that department who helps you with choosing classes and whatnot. That's interesting. I've never heard of professors acting as college advisors. BA/BS thesis advisors, yes of course, but at my school and at -- I think -- every school attended by my friends, advisors were people whose jobs consisted solely of advising undergraduates. Either that, or advisors just didn't exist. I always thought they were kind of unnecessary and wasteful, personally. But I thought a lot of things about college were unnecessary and wasteful. It's interesting to note that over the last decade or so, US colleges (especially private ones) have become increasingly reluctant to give credit for AP coursework.

I did 512 on a lark in somebody else's postcount thread. At least I can say I have never made my own.

facepalm

No. I tried to make one for some of the more community-significant scenarios, and it was extremely difficult. I do have that somewhere and it will be published at some point as part of another project...

Actually, four of the five dragons change genders.

Yeah -- most colleges in the U.S. require you to take at least one or two basic courses in different "core" areas like math or writing, "distribution requirements." And I can't think of any U.S. colleges (except maybe St. John's) that don't give you a fairly massive amount of space to take electives.

Ancient History, Algebra I, and Reading Comprehension. EDIT: I had the same experience, Excalibur. My high school class had 57 people left in it by the time we graduated.

Originally Posted By: Dantius And "good writing" is a term so subjective as to be meaningless There is a big difference between something that is subjective (i.e., you have to take perspective into account when looking at what it means) and something that is meaningless (i.e., it doesn't mean anything regardless of perspective).

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity Somehow I've come to put a higher premium on story, though, so I really just don't like Miéville. The story is always most essential.

Arancaytar is correct, though. Mixing Greek and Latin usually sounds horrible if you are familiar with common English root words from each language. And they don't sound "somewhat similar" at all -- they sound very different when spoken, and I suspect that most users on this forum could easily tell the difference between a Latin sentence and a Greek one, regardless of training. Oh, one nitpick of the original nitpick: thanatos IS greek, not latin, and its meaning slightly distinct from necros.

You can paint a picture that makes it look, on the surface, like language evolution is very similar to species evolution. The truth remains that for the most part, it is not very similar.

Originally Posted By: Dantius Originally Posted By: Locmaar When you speak of 'normal linguistic patterns' by which languages evolve - what exactly do you mean? I'll use a tautology here and say that the patters by which languages evolve are the patters how languages evolved- French and Italian and Spanish are descendants of Latin, etc. Like this, for example. Languages evolve just like species, with common ancestors and all. There's whole fields of study on it- historical/comparative linguists, I think it's called. Elvish, on the other hand, was created as opposed to evolving, so it's like a Frankenstein's Monster of linguists, because you can't make sense of it. But you're really asking the wrong person about this. Yeah, you're right on just about all accounts. Historical linguistics deals with the evolution of languages and language structures. The Elvish languages are constructed languages and not natural languages. They were closely modeled on natural languages. Similarly, they did not actually evolve over time by means of a mass of speakers, but their constructed evolution was closely modeled on natural language evolution. The two counts you are wrong on is 1) that "you can't make sense of" a conlang. Far from it -- conlangs are typically simpler than natural languages and easier to make sense of, especially when (as in Tolkien's case) there are copious notes available. Of course, his languages weren't quite complete either, but single-creator conlangs tend not to be. A whole language is a massive endeavor. 2) Languages do not evolve "just like" species. There are some strong similarities, such as the existence of common ancestors. But languages do not reproduce (certainly not sexually), and natural selection does not operate even remotely in the same way for them. Natural selection applies in a certain sense to specific elements of a language, but the criteria that determine what is selected for vary according to factors that lean heavily on other aspects of the language in question, and not at all on the environment.

Jeff posted at one point that the inspiration came a year or two ago when watching Bartok's Bluebeard opera.

superb answer. the first one.

What does it say about how things really are? It sounds like it says something about how certain types of patterns really work, but is that the same thing?