[CWB] CQPWeb -- Negation operator in simple query language

[Hardie, Andrew]

>> I'm sure that Andrew will allow custom CEQL extension in the CQPweb admin interface sooner or later ...

I fully intend to get round to this eventually, perhaps after I finally get the long-promised ground-up rewrite in INTERCAL out of the way.

Andrew.

(ps I concur, my take is: by and large, we should anticipate that most users who are capable of getting their head round Boolean conditions will be "advanced" enough to benefit from using full CQP-syntax....)

-----Original Message-----
From: cwb-bounces at sslmit.unibo.it [mailto:cwb-bounces at sslmit.unibo.it] On Behalf Of Stefan Evert
Sent: 31 October 2012 15:13
To: Open source development of the Corpus WorkBench
Subject: Re: [CWB] CQPWeb -- Negation operator in simple query language


> Then, may I a suggest to include this negation operator in a future version, if it's not too complex/much work?

Well, that's the "simple" part of the simple query language.  If CEQL could do everything, nobody would learn CQP syntax any more. ;-)

Seriously, I have given some thought to this, of course, but I found that simple negation is rarely needed or very useful unless it's part of a more complex Boolean condition.  Adding such flexible negation patterns to CEQL creates too much complexity for a simple query language -- in my opinion, the more verbose CQP syntax is much better suited to such queries.  And then there's the issue of backward compatibility, as CEQL is by now in use by a fairly large number of BNCweb and CQPweb servers.

What's your concrete use case for the negation?

In any case, CEQL is designed to be extensible, so you can add your own rules (written as Perl subroutines) in order to implement negation (and defined your own syntax that works for your users).  I'm sure that Andrew will allow custom CEQL extension in the CQPweb admin interface sooner or later ...

Best,
Stefan



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