Bill,
This makes more sense to me now that you've explained it this way.

The thing that confused me in the first place is the phrase from the
documentation:

"Expressions are always evaluated left to right...However it is always
possible to force the order of evaluation by using parenthesis"

And you mention "Order does not matter."

I would find it less confusing if the documentation had said "Order does not
matter. However it is always possible to force the order of evaluation by
using parenthesis."

I appreciate your clarifications and the time you spent emailing with me
about this.

Doralyn


-----Original Message-----
From: swish-e@sunsite.berkeley.edu
[mailto:swish-e@sunsite.berkeley.edu]On Behalf Of moseley@hank.org
Sent: Friday, November 07, 2003 5:36 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: [SWISH-E] Re: possible problems with Swish-e searching instru


On Fri, Nov 07, 2003 at 02:15:46PM -0800, Rossmann, Doralyn wrote:
> What my concern is over the phrase in the documentation:
> 
> swish -w "juliet not ophelia and pac" -f myIndex 
>  
> 
> retrieves files which contain ``juliet'' and ``pac'' but not ``ophelia''
> 
> 
> It should say:
> 
> retrieves files which contain   (juliet NOT ophelia) AND pac

That's correct, but I'm guessing that you have have a different idea 
what that "AND pac" means.

That "AND pac" is just a subset of the (juliet NOT ophelia) set.  It's
not all the docs that have pac plus the set of (juliet NOT ophelia). 

That would be:

   (juliet NOT ophelia) OR pac
                        ^^

The original example:

 juliet not ophelia and pac

is the same thing as these:

  (juliet) AND (not ophelia) AND (pac)
  (juliet) AND (pac) AND (not ophelia)

which is what the documentation is trying to saying in English.

Order does not matter.  


I doubt thise example will help (and will look wrong for Outlook users),
but here's how it works:

We have 8 documents.  Ophelia is in doucments 1 3 5 7
That means it is *not* in documents 2 4 6 8

search word | File Numbers:
------------+------------------
juliet        1 2 3 4 5 6
pac                 4 5 6 7 8
not ophelia     2   4   6   8
-----------------------------
AND                 4   6   

So you can see, it's only juliet and pac, but not (and not) ophelia




-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley@hank.org