Behavior of the for-else construct

Chris Angelico rosuav at gmail.com
Sun Mar 6 18:04:45 EST 2022


On Mon, 7 Mar 2022 at 09:51, Avi Gross via Python-list
<python-list at python.org> wrote:
>
> >>>
> Pascal versus PASCAL versus pascal (not versus paschal) and
> Perl versus PERL versus perl (not versus pearl)
>
> seems to be a topic.
> <<<
>
> The nitpickers here are irrelevant. I happen to know how things are formally spelled and if I was publishing a book, might carefully proofread it.

So what you're saying is that you don't really care unless it's in a
book. Good to know. I make errors now and then, but I consider them to
be errors, and I would like to reduce their number.

> Python is named after a snake right? So is it upper case or lower case or mixed case? No, wait, it is named after Monty Python. But what made them choose that name and why would anyone then name a programming language after them? I can see some rudimentary reasoning in naming Ada and maybe for Pascal, albeit I can think of many others who deserve it as much or more that nobody has chosen to honor. Did Turing catch on, I mean as a programming language rather than a machine?
>

If you want strange naming conventions, apparently there's "Apache Pig
Latin", "Ballerina", "Hopscotch", "Mercury", and even this bizarre
thing called "ECMAScript", can't possibly imagine why anyone would use
a thing like that, right?

Things get named, usually by their creators. Deliberately misnaming
something is insulting it.

> I don't care if someone says PYTHON or Python or python when informally discussing things. They all mean the same thing to me. On the other hand, names like "R" and "S" and "C" are rarely presented as lower-case while I sometimes see c++ or c# for some reason. Obviously the right version is upper case, albeit the plus sign and sharp sign have no upper case version.
>
> FORTRAN supposedly stands for FORmula TRANslator or something. So why does it have to be all uppercase? Was COBOL named for COmmon Business Oriented Language. Should it be CoBOL?
>

Because that's what their creators decided. Or are you in a more
authoritative position?

I think you should have been named AVI144, not Avi Gross. We shouldn't
bother to try to call you by your name, it's much more reasonable to
call you something else.

> But if this was being graded in these ways, and I see lots of such nitpicking in other ways when an example focusing on something does not carefully do lots of other things, I probably would focus on the many other things I don't get around to doing in my life because I waste the time here. As a voluntary effort, I can opt out.
>
> The argument that a programming language is named after a person and thus must be spelled some way is not impressing me. Yes, to be strictly correct, it has a proper spelling. But following that reasoning, why does anyone give an email address of john.smith at gmail.com or JANEDOE at yahoo.com instead of ...?
>

Email addresses consist of a mailbox part, interpreted entirely by the
server, and a domain, which is defined as case insensitive and
conventionally written in lowercase. There's no difference between
john.smith at gmail.com and john.smith at GMAIL.COM, but it's up to Google's
servers to decide whether john.smith is the same as JOHN.SMITH (and,
in the case of Google, they've decided that it's the same as johnsmith
and johns.mith too).

ChrisA


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