Edmund Lee wrote:
> Thus indexing a monument of a date that lies near the 'cusp' using terms for
> the both the possible periods is a good idea. But what if your system only
> allows you to put in a sngle term?
Then it's the responsibilty of the _enquirer_ to search for both the
earlier and the later period if he's interested in events near the
boundary (cusp).
(Following up an earlier remark) Orthographic/syntax issues are relatively
simple for time-periods iff you search case-insensitive and ignore
everything that isn't a letter. There are programming languages (eg perl)
that make that easy, eg: /post[^a-z]*media?eval/i is an expression that
will match most of the possible spellings of that term including the
american ones. I am not decrying the value of a consistent spelling
though, as we don't all have such tools, though we could have, perl being
free software :-)
John Palmer
69 St Cross Road, Winchester SO23 9RE, England
+44 1962 865261
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http://www.stx69.demon.co.uk/
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