Steven D'Aprano <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Thu, 10 Nov 2005 21:41:52 -0800, Alex Martelli wrote: > > >> Obfuscation has it's place. > > > > What I think of this thesis is on a par of what I think of this way of > > spelling the possessive adjective "its" (and equally unprintable in > > polite company). > > Aside: given that "it's" is "it is", how would you spell the possessive > case of it?
As I was thought and have always seen it spelled in good literature -- "its". I'm not at all tempted to affix "'s" to make possessives out of pronouns -- "I's", "you's", "we's"...?!-) Remember, English is not my native language, so what I have internalized are _rules_, not a native speaker's magical communion with the language...;-) > Not that I disagree with you about obfuscation in general, but I can think > of one particular usage case for obfuscation which is neither useless nor > morally suspect: > > "Now listen carefully class, your homework for this week is to write a > program to blurgle a frobnitz. As a test of correctness, your program > must return the same results as the test function blurglise. Before you > get any clever ideas of copying the code from blurglise, keep in mind > firstly that the source code is obfuscated, and secondly that I am not an > idiot, I will recognise my own code if you try to pass it off as yours." Sure, that's one example -- but the instructor SHOULD really consider placing burglise on a secure server on the intranet instead, making it available (via CGI, webservice, whatever) to check input/output relationships, rather than making the obfuscated code available and raising questions of obfuscation and reverse engineering. Alex -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
