Explanation of this Python language feature? [x for x in x for x in x] (to flatten a nested list)

[Mark H Harris]

On 3/29/14 12:08 AM, Chris Angelico wrote:

>
> Okay. History lesson time.
>

    Tell me what is the lingua franka today?

    Is it,   E n g l i s h ?

    For many many many years people all over the earth were using 
English and ASCII to communicate with early computers... they still are. 
Almost every post on every site is English, and nearly every post on 
every site is a Latin character derivative.

    Kanji and Cyrillic , and Arabic are obvious exceptions to that 
today, mostly because of unicode; NOT extend ASCII.



> Back before I was born, people were using computers to write messages
> that weren't in English.

    No, they weren't... not most... some.

> And they managed it, somehow. Can't imagine
> how, if all computers work exclusively with seven-bit Latin-derived
> character sets.

    Unicode. Shoot, most of the world didn't even have computers until 
just a few years ago; none of the third world did, back in the day, and 
the ones who did communicated in ASCII and English (or some broken 
variant of it).

> "Most non-third-world countries use Latin-derived character sets".

    See this quote from the consortium FAQ:

    >  So, for example, there is only one set of Latin characters
    > defined, despite the fact that the Latin script
    > is used for the alphabets of thousands of different languages.

http://www.unicode.org/faq/basic_q.html#3


marcus