On Aug 12, 7:19 pm, Steven D'Aprano <st...@remove-this- cybersource.com.au> wrote:
> You are making an unjustified assumption: \y is not an error. You are making in an unjustified assumption that I ever made such an assumption! My claim is and has always been NOT that \y is inately an error, but rather that treating unrecognized escape sequences as legal escape sequences is error PRONE. > While I'm amused that you've made my own point for me, I'm less > amused that you seem to be totally incapable of seeing past your > parochial language assumptions, Where do you get the notion that my assumptions are in any sense "parochial"? They come from (1) a great deal of experience programming very reliable software, and (2) having learned at least two dozen different programming languages in my life. > I disagree with nearly everything you say in this post. I think > that a few points you make have some validity, but the vast > majority are based on a superficial and confused understanding > of language design principles. Whatever. I've taken two graduate level classes at MIT on programming languages design, and got an A in both classes, and designed my own programming language as a final project, and received an A+. But I guess I don't really know anything about the topic at all. > But it's not the only reasonable design choice, and Bash has > made a different choice, and Python has made yet a third > reasonable choice, and Pascal made yet a fourth reasonable choice. And so did Perl and PHP, and whatever other programming language you happen to mention. In fact, all programming languages are equally good, so we might as well just freeze all language design as it is now. Clearly we can do no better. > One party insisting that red is the only logical colour for a > car, and that anybody who prefers white or black or blue is > illogical, is unacceptable. If having all cars be red saved a lot of lives, or increased gas mileage significantly, then it might very well be the best color for a car. But of course, that is not the case. With programming languages, there is much more likely to be an actual fact of the matter on which sorts of language design decisions make programmers more productive on average, and which ones result in more reliable software. I will certainly admit that obtaining objective data on such things is very difficult, but it's a completely different thing that one's color preference for their car. |>ouglas -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list