Assignment Versus Equality

[Rustom Mody]

On Wednesday, June 29, 2016 at 7:58:04 AM UTC+5:30, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Jun 2016 12:13 am, Random832 wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Jun 28, 2016, at 00:31, Rustom Mody wrote:
> >> GG downgrades posts containing unicode if it can, thereby increasing
> >> reach to recipients with unicode-broken clients
> > 
> > That'd be entirely reasonable, except for the excessively broad
> > application of "if it can".
> > 
> > Certainly it _can_ do it all the time. Just replace anything that
> > doesn't fit with question marks or hex notation or \N{NAME} or some
> > human readable pseudo-representation a la unidecode. It could have done
> > any of those with the Hindi that you threw in to try to confound it, (or
> > it could have chosen ISCII, which likewise lacks arrow characters, as
> > the encoding to downgrade to).
> 
> Are you suggesting that email clients and newsreaders should silently mangle
> the text of your message behind your back? Because that's what it sounds
> like you're saying.
> 
> I understand technical limitations. If I'm using a client that can't cope
> with anything but (say) ISCII or Latin-1, then I'm all out of luck if I
> want to write an email containing Greek or Cyrillic. I get that.
> 
> But if the client allows me to type Greek or Cyrillic into the editor, and
> then accepts that message for sending, and it mangles it into "question
> marks or hex notation or \N{NAME}" (for example), that's a disgrace and
> completely unacceptable.
> 
> Yes, software *is capable of doing so*, in the same way that software is
> capable of deleting all the vowels from your post, or replacing the
> word "medieval" with "medireview":
> 
> http://northernplanets.blogspot.com.au/2007/01/medireview.html
> 
> This is not a good idea.

Yeah
I remember it silently converted «guillemets» to <<guillemets>>
[This is an experiment :-) ]