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

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 29 March 2014 13:12:06 Roy Smith did opine:

> In article <87txahi68z.fsf at elektro.pacujo.net>,
> 
>  Marko Rauhamaa <marko at pacujo.net> wrote:
> > (But no, I wouldn't name my variables in Hebrew because the next
> > maintainer might not have a keyboard like mine.)
> 
> Have you ever done any work in PHP?  Many of the error messages are
> Hebrew, transliterated into English.  I've gotten many a
> T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM error.

Ok, I'll bite, does that have an American English translation?

We did the majority of our web page at WDTV in the earlier years from a 
server we wrote in ARexx running PHP scripts on a souped up Amiga, (we 
farmed it out about the time we made the digital switch because Jim no 
longer had the time to do it full time, and of course the farmed out 
version sucks) but while that wasn't my forte, I don't recall Jim ever 
mentioning PHP error messages as being in Hebrew.

I recall from a mailing list discussion about why English was the dominant 
language, probably a decade or more back up the log so it is not in my 
email corpus now, and a Turkish professor of one of the other latin 
languages nailed it at the time. In terms of the language moving to keep up 
with the state of the art, English moves, rapidly and smoothly and our 
dictionaries are updated to add the new words at many times the pace of the 
older languages.

Some progress is being made of course, we now have what, 18 language linux 
can speak, I'd assume with a certain amount of kicking and screaming, but 
it seems to me that it is still pretty true. Engrish, as exported from 
Japan in their tech manuals doesn't count, we can usually figure out what 
the Sony engineers were trying to say.

Not that it will be appreciated by those younger English speakers here, 
who, because their schools failed them, never got any phonetic tutoring.  I 
did, and as I approach my 80th birthday, I truly feel like the last of a 
dying breed because they dropped that from the elementary school curriculum 
a year later.  That loss, to the language as a whole, is very telling in 
what one hears being spoken on the streets of small town America today, 
much of which would have earned me an F back in the 1940's.  Today, saying 
that the language has been butchered, gives the skilled butcher a bad 
reputation.  But we muddle along, somehow managing to survive all those 
legal warnings on a bottle of aspirin. :)

Cheers, Gene
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
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-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>