Subject: CC_CALC comment

From: Doug Schiffer <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Dec 1993 08:28:00 -0500

On Tue 12-21-93,  8:41 am, John McRae wrote:

 >I'm interested in the transliteration conversion engine you mention.  It
 >would be interesting if you'd place these programs on ifcss.org (the
 >internet address is 129.107.1.155); I believe the procedure is that you
 >ftp to the site, use "anonymous" as your username and your e-mail address
 >as your password, and "put" your file into the /incoming directory.
 >Better check around for complete/correct instructions.

So far, the transliteration engine is built into CC_CALC.  I've thought
about breaking it out into a separate program, but didn't know if there'd
be any interest in a standalone converter.  :-)

In it's current incarnation, it converts from Pinyin to any of the
other systems, with semi-intelligent translation.  By semi-intelligent,
I mean it breaks apart a pinyin syllable into initial and
final portions as well as tone number.  It then converts these into
the corresponding elements of other systems.  It knows about exceptions
that arise in this process.  Thus, if presented with a Pinyin word
that it was not initially tested against, it stands a fair chance of
correctly converting it.  This stands in contrast to a table lookup
approach, which if presented with an unknown word has no chance of giving
the correct translation.

Internally, it uses one 16 bit word to code the Chinese syllable.  As
an added benefit, you can efficiently store any Chinese syllable in
only 2 bytes, and output in any of the systems listed.

 >BTW, are these programs for DOS?

Yes, I failed to mention that.

        Doug Schiffer