what does := means simply?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, 18 May 2018 20:42:05 -0400, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:

> 	Unfortunately -- in the current era, "text" means "a defined 
encoding",

Text has ALWAYS meant "a defined encoding". It is just that for a long 
time, people could get away with assuming that the encoding they used was 
the *only* possible encoding, and using it implicitly without even 
thinking about it.

That One True Encoding is, of course, EBCDIC.

No, I kid, of course it is Mac-Roman.

Ha ha, no, just pulling your leg... of course it's ISO 8859-1 (not to be 
confused with ISO-8859-1, yes the hyphen is significant). Except for web 
browsers, which are required to interpret declarations of ISO 8859-1 as 
CP-1252 instead.

Actually, I'm still kidding around. Everyone knows the One True Encoding 
is ISCII. (That's not a typo.)



-- 
Steve