language-theory

The first part of this question is now its own, here: Analyzing Text for Accents Question: How could accents be added to generated speech? What I've come up with: I do not mean just accent marks, or inflection, or anything singular like that. I mean something like a full British accent, or a Scottish accent, or Russian, etc. I would think that this could be done outside of the language as well. Ex : something in Russian could be generated with a British accent, or something in Mandarin could have a Russian accent. I think the basic process would be this: Analyze the text Compare with a

I know that a semicolon is required after a statement (I'm talking about Java, C++, and similar languages), but is not required after a curled bracket. Why so? if (a > b) printf("hello!"); // semicolon is mandatory if (a > b) { printf("hello!"); } // semicolon is not required What is the reason? I mean, what is the theory behind this? Because curly brackets are used for grouping statements, but they are not statements themselves. Because the language is defined as: statement: labeled-statement expression-statement compound-statement selection-statement iteration-statement jump-statement

Im having a problem in solving the problem:- Its an assignment, i solved it, but it seems to be too long and vague, Can anyboby help me please...... Regular expression for the strings with even number of a's and odd number of b's where the character set={a,b}. One way to do this is to pass it through two regular expressions making sure they both match (assuming you want to use regular expressions at all, see below for an alternative): ^b*(ab*ab*)*$ ^a*ba*(ba*ba*)*$ Anything else (and, in fact, even that) is most likely just an attempt to be clever, one that's generally a massive failure. The

I've found that lots of people use the words closure and block interchangeably. Most of these people can't explain what they're talking about. Some Java programmers (even ones from really expensive consultancies) talk about anonymous inner classes as "blocks" and "closures" - but I know this isn't true. (You can't pass mutable variables in from the scope of the method in which they're defined...) I'm looking for: a precise, computer science definition of a block a precise, computer science definition of a closure and clarification on the difference between the two. I'd really like to see links