commas vs. spaces. vs. the legions of new lines

[G. Lewis]

Geez, you peoples, quit sniping on the folks posting their little
modules lately (if i may snipe at you to say)!

So the unix old-timers <wink> know a billion and one ways to convert
Dos to Unix text files.  Why discourage someone from making a pure
python implementation... and a decent attempt at it as well, with
subdirectories and attempts at some sort of "smart" file type guessing.
Not a tool I'd use, myself, but surely it has value. Or even if it
didn't, still surely it does not deserve denegration. Not one person
complimented his code. Just a load of "tr is my best buddy, saved my ass
a few times in war, I'll tell you" messages. Sad. What is this,
comp.lang.perl?!! <more winks>

Then a sincere fellow posts a nice little routine which puts (gasp!)
spaces in numbers. (It IS valid formatting!) What does he get? People
saying that if you pipe those numbers to other programs you will blow
things up (great insight!). People claiming the use of spaces in numbers
is heretical and perhaps not even a valid form of artistic expression
(if not scientific) (at least someone stuck up for the honour of our
hapless poster over this practice---after all, spaces are a metric
thing, are they not? I believe i was taught that in school long
ago---though i've always used commas in my real-life). The poster does
have a point you know: it is weird the way it is so common to see comma,
decimal point, or SPACE seperators in real life, that hardly a
programming language has a standard routine for this very common
formatting practice.

Anyhow, lets be nice and not snipe. Otherwise people like me might start
sniping about the snipping. And then people will start sniping about the
people like me sniping about the sniping. And on and on.

c.l.py has an exellent reputation for being extremely friendly and
helpful---i'm astonished at the general endless patience I've seen
exhibited here, even for the most inane and pathetic newbie FAQs.
Lets keep it!

Sorry to lecture. Just had to get it off my chest. Had nothing better
to do at the moment. Etc etc. One big happy family, and all that! I
know you'll forgive me.



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