On Fri, Jul 21, 2017 at 2:46 AM, Rhodri James <rho...@kynesim.co.uk> wrote: > On 20/07/17 16:18, Rustom Mody wrote: >> >> So coming to the point: >> Its not whether Einstein or Mencken¹ is right but rather that Mencken >> applies to >> 1 whereas Einstein applies to 3 >> >> And (IMHO) text should be squarely classed in 3 not 1 >> >> The gmas of this world have made shopping lists, written (and taught to >> write) >> letters [my gpa wrote books] long before CS and before any of us existed. >> >> And if suddenly text has moved from being obvious to anyone to something >> arcane >> involving >> - codepoints (which are abstract and platonic) >> - (≠) glyphs >> - (that fit into) octets (whatever that may be except they are not bytes) >> - And all other manner of Unicode-gobbledygook >> Something somewhere is wrong > > > The something that is wrong is a failure to consider the necessary _depth_ > of knowledge. The shallow (read: obvious and intuitive) definition of text > works just fine in the context of grandma's shopping list or granddad's > book, localised environments with heavily circumscribed usage patterns. It > breaks down in the global environments we've been talking about in much the > same way that the obvious and intuitive definition of numbers breaks down > when you start considering infinities, or Newtonian mechanics breaks down > near the speed of light, or pretty much everything intuitive breaks down at > quantum scales.
ALL of the problems in this thread can be explained to a cat. https://xkcd.com/722/ I wouldn't ask the cat's opinion on the definition of a character, though. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
