syntax difference

[Jim Lee]

On 06/17/2018 05:39 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 18, 2018 at 10:22 AM, Jim Lee <jlee54 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 06/17/2018 02:17 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
>>> [snip]
>>> My apologies, stuff wrapped and I misread as I skimmed back. You were
>>> the one who used the word "shoehorned". In the same way, that sounds
>>> like you already knew the language, and then someone added extra
>>> features that don't fit. It's not shoehorning if the feature was
>>> already there before you met the language.
>>>
>>> The point is the same, the citation incorrect. Mea culpa.
>>>
>>> ChrisA
>>
>> Of course it is "shoehorning".  Why do you care when I started using the
>> language?  Shoehorning implies an attempt to add a feature that didn't exist
>> in the original design - a feature that is a difficult, awkward, or
>> ill-fitting complement to the original design.  Whether it happened
>> yesterday or 12 years ago is immaterial.  When I personally met the language
>> is also immaterial.
>>
>> Microsoft "shoehorned" a Linux subsystem into Windows.  I don't even use
>> Windows, yet by your logic, I can't call it "shoehorning".
> Or maybe that's an indication of a change in design goals. Python's
> original goal was to be very similar to C, and thus had a lot of
> behaviours copied from C; up until Python 2.2, the default 'int' type
> would overflow if it exceeded a machine word. Were long integers
> shoehorned into the design, or does it indicate that the design was
> modified to welcome them?
>
> Personally, I think the Linux subsystem is (a) no different from (but
> converse to) Wine, and (b) a good stepping-stone towards a Windows
> release using a Unix kernel.
>
> ChrisA
I say: "frobnitz was broken".

You say: "you can't call frobnitz broken because it was broken before 
you found out it was broken".


I say: "foo is bad".

You say: "foo is no different than bar (except it's the opposite), and 
might eventually be like baz (which doesn't exist)."


Hard to argue with that kind of...umm...logic.  :)

-Jim