On Sat, Nov 23, 2013 at 12:41 AM, Roy Smith <r...@panix.com> wrote: > Also, every semicolon we save can be broken down and res-used as TWO > decimal points! The Americans use the top part, most other places use > the bottom part. It's like a punctuation breeder reactor. One piece > goes in, and two come out.
That's only the glyph, though. You can't do that with the codepoints - all you end up with is a U+0003 'END OF TEXT' and a U+000B 'LINE TABULATION', useful occasionally but hardly in great demand. No, once you've broken the glyph apart, there's not a lot you can do with the codepoint, and they end up filling the nuclear waste disposal caverns. People keep coming up with schemes for utilizing waste U+0003s, but there's a fundamental problem that text can only end once [1], and all attempts to use U+0003 in commercial use resulted in the premature termination of the text concerned. Of course, the FDA put an immediate stop to that - so expensive to compensate the families of the terminated text - so we're back where we started. ChrisA [1] As is stated in the Holy Writ, Hebrews 9:27: "Just as text is destined to end once, and after that to face judgment, so C strings receive but a single NUL to terminate the strings of many." -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
