Comment on PEP-0322: Reverse Iteration Methods

[Stephen Horne]

On Mon, 29 Sep 2003 08:15:41 -0400, David Abrahams
<dave at boost-consulting.com> wrote:

>That's why I didn't understand why you were giving me such a hard
>time.  Because it's informal speech I'm supposed to do quadruple duty
>to make sure you haven't misinterpreted me?  I really was going out
>of my way to explain this stuff to you politely.

Nope - occasional misreadings are a fact of life and shouldn't be a
big deal. But when you said "I never, anywhere, said "std::pair
supports..."" that seemed very pedantic to me, as the issue wasn't
your precise words but the meaning behind them. And when you said
"Hey, it's not my fault you read what you want to see into what I
posted." you seemed to be claiming that there was no room for
reasonable misinterpretation in your original words and that I was
100% to blame for the misinterpretation.

The whole point of my pedanticism was to point out that your original
statement was informal and subjective and that, while that was
certainly wholy appropriate, there was room for accidental
misinterpretation. IIRC I was not even the first to misinterpret - I
simply replied to Alex Martelli who had already misinterpreted your
words the same way that I did. So being made a scapegoat seemed
unfair.

And now I seem to be whining about it far to much, but really I just
want this point to be understood - and I wish I had been clear about
it in my last post.

>Then so is 
>
>     struct { int x, y; };
>
>Also, so is char[4], and unsigned long is a container of at least 32
>bits.

Not in the pedantic 'C++ standard definition' sense of course, but the
C++ standard has taken an existing word and tied a more restrictive
meaning to it. In the wider world the original unrestricted meaning is
still valid.

To me both structs and char arrays are containers in the
less-restrictive sense. After all, if a C programmer talks about
containers what is he referring to? And in C# even a fixed-size array
is implemented using a library class.

An unsigned long, no - that is a single atomic item. But then again,
IIRC, in the pre-C++ days when I first learned programming, 'container
for a value' was one common way of explaining the concept of a
variable ;-)

>Thanks, I think.  This is somewhat of a backhanded apology, but I'll
>take it.  [If you had just stopped with the last message, I wouldn't
>even feel it mattered].

I felt it mattered because I felt that I was being held soley and
entirely responsible for a mistake that I felt wasn't unreasonable.

I appologise for the misinterpretation because I did misinterpret, and
I particularly appologise for the overblowing because it arises out of
my oversensitivity to certain things you said - which I certainly have
no right to given the sarcastic tone of my earlier post, and in any
case I have no doubt your words resulted from frustration.

I do not, however, accept that I am enirely and soley to responsible
for the misinterpretation.

My persistence in sticking to this may seem bizarre and petty, but
there are reasons for my being bizarre and petty over such things.
Lets just call it 'desperate defending of what little self esteem I
have left' - and yes, it does tend to be counterproductive :-(

>http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/typeiter.html#l2h-149
>
>Read it twice, carefully.

OK - you are right and I am feeling a right fool. Sorry.

>I'm afraid not.  I never, ever make mistakes in the first place ;->
>
>infallib-ly y'rs

:-)


-- 
Steve Horne

steve at ninereeds dot fsnet dot co dot uk