Assignment Versus Equality

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, 28 Jun 2016 12:23 am, Rustom Mody wrote:

> On Monday, June 27, 2016 at 6:58:26 PM UTC+5:30, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>> On Mon, 27 Jun 2016 10:48 pm, Rustom Mody wrote:
>> 
>> > PS Google Groups is wise enough to jump through hoops trying to encode
>> > my message above as latin-1, then as Windows 1252 and only when that
>> > does not work as UTF-8
>> 
>> 
>> There is nothing admirable about GG (or any other newsreader or email
>> client) defaulting to legacy encodings like Latin-1 and especially not
>> Windows 1252.
>> 
>> Certainly the user should be permitted to explicitly set the encoding,
>> but otherwise the program should default to UTF-8.
> 
> Its called sarcasm...


Ah, sorry about that, I didn't realise.

Some human languages have native support for flagging sarcasm, e.g. there's
a sarcasm marker called temherte slaqî used by some Ethiopic languages to
indicate sarcasm and other unreal statements. It apparently looks somewhat
like an upside down exclamation mark (¡).

Another common solution is to use "scare quotes" around the sarcastic key
words. Or you could tag the sentence with <sarcasm> </sarcasm> tags. Most
people I see using this last one just show the close tag, often
abbreviating it to just /s on its own.


> Also how is GG deliberately downgrading clear unicode content to be kind
> to obsolete clients at recipient end different from python 2 → 3 making
> breaking changes but not going beyond ASCII lexemes?

Oh yes, I completely agree, obviously GvR is literally worse than Hitler
because he hasn't added a bunch of Unicode characters with poor support for
input and worse support for output as essential syntactic elements to
Python.

/s




-- 
Steven
“Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure
enough, things got worse.