Perl is worse!

[Paul Foley]

On Sun, 30 Jul 2000 02:21:54 GMT, Steve Lamb wrote:

> On Sat, 29 Jul 2000 22:18:31 GMT, Joshua Macy <amused at webamused.com> wrote:
>> So it's not the term itself you find offensive, but the way it's
>> used?  It sounds to me like what you're objecting to is the mere fact
>> that some people dislike the behavior that Larry Wall calls "automagic",
>> not that they use the same term that he does to describe that behavior.

>     What, is this forum a place where context means nothing and everything,
> including natural language, has to be typed to death.  Let me give you a basic
> example.  Nigger.  Offensive or not?  Hmm, tell me, is it?

Words in and of themselves are just words; it's the _meaning_ that you
attribute to that word that may or may not be offensive (and in this
case is generally considered to be so, yes)  A given word may have
more than one meaning, and the intended meaning may be determinable by
context, but that isn't to say that the context _defines_ the meaning;
the meaning is present ab initio and outside of any choice of words.
Similarly, a Python variable can mean different things in different
contexts:

  a = "xyz"

  def foo():
      a = 6

  class Bar:
      a = None
      def quux(self):
          a = [1, (2, 3), "four"]

has "a" meaning 4 different things: it's a string in the outermost
scope, an integer inside foo(), None in the class definition, and a
list inside the quux() method.  But the thing being named, whichever
of those things it is, isn't changed in any way by the fact that the
same name also means something else (or by the potential for other
names to mean the same thing).

>     Marcelus Wallus - "You my nigger?"

>     Whoops, guess it isn't in some contexts, now is it?  What I object to is

Isn't it?  Are you sure about that?

-- 
Nonono, while we're making wild conjectures about the behavior of
completely irrelevant tasks, we must not also make serious mistakes,
or the data might suddenly become statistically valid.
                                                         -- Erik Naggum
(setq reply-to
  (concatenate 'string "Paul Foley " "<mycroft" '(#\@) "actrix.gen.nz>"))