for / while else doesn't make sense

[Ned Batchelder]

On Monday, May 23, 2016 at 9:06:13 PM UTC-4, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Tue, 24 May 2016 08:36 am, Christopher Reimer wrote:
> 
> > Those symbols are blowing my 8-bit ASCII brain. :)
> 
> That's certainly true, because there is no such thing as 8-bit ASCII. ASCII
> is a 7-bit encoding. (Most implementations set the extra bit to zero, a few
> *very* old machines might have set it to one, and if I remember correctly,
> Wordstar used to use it for its own internal purposes.)
> 
> What people usually mean by "extended 8-bit ASCII" is a large family of many
> different extensions to ASCII, many of which have multiple names for added
> confusion, such as Latin-1, ISO-8859-2, MacRoman, and many more. None of
> these are ASCII, although they contain ASCII as a subset of their
> characters (just as Unicode does).

Ugh, can we please stop with the "well, actually" pedantic tangents?  I know
we are fascinated by the details of computing, and yes, details matter, but
this just gets exhausting.

The good dynamic here of helping people with Python gets lost in the endless
trivia threads, and bickering over details that are four or five times removed
from the original question.

Assume the best of others, and stay focused :)

--Ned.