On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 5:03 PM, Shadowfirebird <shadowfirebird / gmail.com> wrote:
>> But that's not a question! It's an exuberant and wrong statement about a
>> fictitious city named "What"! (cue Abbott and Costello)
>
> Imagine a very angry teacher.  ¨Âîä òåíåíâåò ôèáô ùïãáî§åîóåîôåîãå ÷éôè §¿¡§
Even an angry teacher will state a question (a rising inflection on
the last word/syllable of a sentence).

Punctuation reflects these changes in inflection/speech patterns (like
periods signaling long breaks, as are common to end a sentence, comma
signaling shorter pauses within a sentence which usually imply
additional information about the preceding topic, and so on).

TL;DR: Parsing a natural language is *hard*.

-- 
Phillip Gawlowski

Though the folk I have met,
(Ah, how soon!) they forget
When I've moved on to some other place,
There may be one or two,
When I've played and passed through,
Who'll remember my song or my face.