Why not allow empty code blocks?

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Aug 3, 2016 at 11:04 PM, BartC <bc at freeuk.com> wrote:
> On 03/08/2016 13:36, Chris Angelico wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Aug 3, 2016 at 10:16 PM, Rustom Mody <rustompmody at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> There he comes waddling in… Your  cute-n-cudly strawman!!
>>> A more realistic analogy would be phones
>>> The cellphones we use today often crash
>>> The first nokia I used never crashed but could still run out of battery
>>> And the round-dial landlines of 30 years ago had not even that problem
>>
>>
>> 1986? Yeah, we had a phone from then (granted, I don't remember much
>> of 1986, but we had the same handsets in the 1990s), and it could run
>> out of battery and lose its phone book.
>
>
> He said landlines. A typical handset would have no battery as it's powered
> from the line. And does not have need a memory to function. Nor would it
> suffer from lack of signal. Or credit (if you'd paid the last bill). Or get
> lost (as it's tethered to the socket).
>
> Very clunky technology but it was solid! It only did one thing but it did it
> incredibly well.

Yes, I was talking about landlines. It did have a battery, and it did
have a phone book. (And it did get lost, too, but that's because we
had a lot of papers and stuff in that corner of the kitchen. We knew
it was SOMEWHERE in the pile, but can you find it before the caller
gives up?) And it actually suffered from lack of signal more often
than you might think. We called them "outages", and they were the
phone system's equivalent to power blackouts. Usually from the same
cause, too - a car crashed into a pole somewhere and snapped the
wires.

The only issue I might have about this is whether it dated back to
1986. I asked my mother, and she couldn't remember quite when they
came out. Certainly they were around in the early 1990s, and they
weren't new then, so they can't be more than a couple years off the
30-years-ago estimate. Can you blame me if I take "30 years ago" and
answer it from 28? :)

ChrisA