Thursday, July 12, 2007

The Case of the Missing Semicolon

If this was a crime fiction murder mystery, we'd begin in a mysterious fog shrouded alley with a distant silhouette of a man in a fedora hunched over a lit cigarette - but surprise, this isn't a murder mystery =] The Missing Semicolon I speak of is one on the end of a line - on the end of a line of Javascript.

This might make a bit more sense if I actually explain it. After I finished my NLP Question Answering system for Dr Curran, he basically said it was good, but wasn't good enough - some more work was needed. To do the stuff he wanted, I'd basically have to use Javascript. Luckily I'm a quick learner, and I filled in the gaps of my knowledge and got underway. Only major gripes - Javascript debuggers don't tell you anything! I sat there looking the code over and over, nearly going mad, trying to find some sort of error - and - oh look at that, a single missing semicolon... So yes, other than the lacking thorough debugging support for the language, and a slight annoyance at the way it handles the scope of variables (that may just be being silly though ^_^)
It only works with Firefox (only needed to work with Firefox) and there's a chance it may work with Opera/Safari but next to no chance with IE.
NLP QA Quick Answer System
I could learn to live with Javascript if browser interoperability was less of an pain =]

Other than that I haven't done a lot the last few days... Huzzah for the lazy =]
Smerity

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