Some more questions...

[Hans Nowak]

Howdy y'all,

Here are some more dumb questions... (See the message called "Package
question")

1. Why isn't there a boolean xor operator? Yes, I asked this question
some years ago, and someone
(possibly Guido) answered that 'and' and 'or' could get away with
evaluation only one operand, in
some cases, while 'xor' cannot. While this is true, I still don't
understand why that is a reason
not to implement xor. I don't know much about language design, so that
might explain my lack of
understanding. :)  
Still, I would like it if someone here could tell me why xor cannot be
implemented,
especially considering the gratuitous new features that have been added
lately.

2. A mailing list question: I normally get the c.l.py messages by email
and store them automagically
in a folder in my mail program. I always thought that the mailing list
would show the exact same
messages as the newsgroup. However, looking at Just van Rossum's graph
(http://starship.python.net/~just/FindMailStats/) shows that for the
last 4 months, there have
been over 4000 messages in the newsgroup. Strangely, *none* of my
message folders has more than
4000 messages in it. Now this could be a glitch of my mail program, but
just to make sure, do
others recognize this situation?

3. A related question: The pipermail archives at www.python.org show
archive size of 10-15 Mb for
the 1999 archives, and sizes of 1-2 Mb for 2000! I downloaded the zipped
archive of September 1999, which revealed a 40 Mb behemoth which
apparently lots of double messages... and more than double,
a quick search for a message said it appeared 13 times! The 2000
archives do not have this, except
for January, obviously. The obvious question is: why is this? Why do the
1999 archives have so
many copies of the same message? I would like to download them for
offline viewing, but browsing
a 40 Mb file with lots of copies kind of discourages me.

OK, I'll stop nitpicking now... :)

Veel liefs,