Is this String class properly implemented?

[Richard Herring]

I've never even seen that.

I believe it only survives in the "New Yorker" ;-)

 

[osmium]

I believe it only survives in the "New Yorker" ;-)

What does that mean? I understood what it *said* until I got to the smiley.
Do you believe that the smiley has some basic and agreed upon meaning? If
so, what is that meaning and where is it defined? I believe many people use
it as a form of negation, kind of an equivalent of a SNL "not". As far as I
am concerned it has just become an annoying noise glyph which may alter the
meaning of what is said and may not.

 

[James Kanze]

What does that mean? I understood what it *said* until I got
to the smiley. Do you believe that the smiley has some basic
and agreed upon meaning?

It means that the preceding sentence isn't to be taken too
seriously. If the sentence had been spoken, the author would
have been smiling when he said it.

If so, what is that meaning and where is it defined? I
believe many people use it as a form of negation, kind of an
equivalent of a SNL "not".

Not really. It means that the statement is being said in a
joking manner. In some contexts, this might imply that it is
false (but not at all in the same way that the "not" does), but
certainly not in all contexts.

As far as I am concerned it has just become an annoying noise
glyph which may alter the meaning of what is said and may not.

It corresponds to something you'd use tone of voice or
expression to indicate in spoken English. It's used on the net
because the level of English here is often closer to spoken
English than it is to traditional written English.

 

[Richard Herring]

What does that mean? I understood what it *said* until I got to the smiley.
Do you believe that the smiley has some basic and agreed upon meaning? If
so, what is that meaning and where is it defined?
http://www.ccil.org/jargon/jargon_20.html#TAG550
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon

I believe many people use
it as a form of negation, kind of an equivalent of a SNL "not".

Not in my experience.

As far as I
am concerned it has just become an annoying noise glyph which may alter the
meaning of what is said and may not.

:-(

 

[Tony]

In message <[email protected]>, Tony
Richard Herring wrote:
In message <[email protected]>, Tony
Richard Herring wrote:
In message <[email protected]>, Tony
Jerry Coffin wrote:
[...]
The English alphabet has 26 characters. No more, no less.

Unfortunately statements like this weaken your point. By any
reasonable measure, the English alphabet contains at least 26
characters (upper and lower case).

Fine, upper and lower case then. But no umlauts or accent marks!

How naïve. My _English_ dictionary includes déjà vu, gâteau and many
other words with diacritics.

And how many variable names do you create with those foreign glyphs?
Hmm?

Who cares? I'm merely providing a counterexample to your sweeping
claim that the English alphabet has exactly 26 characters. Or even 52.

I meant letters, not characters.

That doesn't help you, since you need more than just those 26 or 52
letters to represent English words.

That's a strawman

I think you need to check the definition of "strawman".

Probably, but you know what I meant.

(And the Welsh alphabet has 28, despite lacking J, K, Q, V, X, Z). So
what? 26 letters alone are not sufficient for writing English.

Who's talking about literary writings?! I'm talking about programming and
engineering.

Nor is it what you want to redefine it to be, as any "dummy" can discover
by simply reading the thread. "7-bit ASCII is your friend".

That quote is true, at least if you know how to do it. I went on to say:
"no, probably not for you, but indeed it is for me!". So you misquoted me:
do you enjoy taking things out of context and using them opportunistically
evilly?

Largely. Thank you for that concession.

Twas no concession. The implication was that some applications, by mandate
or desire, are specified to target other languages or language elements
(letters mainly, we are talking about).

So you keep telling us.

That's the definition. It's also a great (if not obvious) engineering
recognition.

Fine; that's your choice. And if the customers for your software are
equally not worried that it can't cope with such words, that's even more
fine.

But _you_ don't get to define what's "unnaturalized", "foreign" or "Pure
English".

You are free sprinkle hieroglyphics into your source code variable names
rather than using just ASCII. You really should stop trying to get me to do
so though, cuz it ain't gonna ever happen.

 

[Tony]

It's easy enough to verify.

The first part about NNTP was not the main point in the passage: the fact
that most USENET posts in threaded discussion groups contain only 7-bit
ASCII characters is what I was hypothesizing.

Opening and closing quotes are part of English. At least, part
of the English used by people who've gotten beyond kindergarden.

And there's room for them in a 7-bit definition. The question is whether
it's worth it. You're hardly making any case for Unicode with the quotes
argument.

I don't have a "tagline". In fact, I don't know what you mean
by a "tagline". My .sig uses accented characters, because it
contains my address.

".sig" then. I've been calling it a tagline.

I'll also occasionally use characters
outside of the 96 basic characters in the body of my postings:
things like a section reference (§) when quoting the standard,
for example, or a non-breaking space.

That's not a letter: it's a symbol. Booch notation is it's own contrivation
(like a "codepage") also. Blueprints and wiring diagrams have bunches of
symbols. They are not part of the English language and are not additions to
the 26 recognized characters of the English language.

So the Merriam Webster Dictionary is not English

Published dictionaries have similarities to publlished bibles, that's all
they are: one point of view. Not recognizing the environment of this NG and
bringing everything remotely related to the discussion is dreary (at best).

Not according to Merriam Webster.

Merriam Webster is lame "appeal to authority" argument. Especially given all
the dialog to date in just this thread.

But of course, you know more
about English than the standard dictionaries.

See "lame appeal to authority" above. Also see "condescension/defamation as
a weapon or as a last resort".

A minus sign, a hyphen, an n-dash and an m-dash are four
separate characters.

Yet C++ embraces contextual meaning. (Aside). While there is room for
separate characters for the aforementioned in a -bit encoding, you've not
made any case for them being valuable as separate characters in an encoding,
and therefor much much less case for such a thing in ALL encodings (or the
proverbial "The Encoding to End all Encodings").

Because I don't have the dashes in ISO
8859-1, I simulate them with -- and ---, but it's really a hack.

You want dash, I'm OK with a dash character added to the punctuation set
(it's just for data though and not code).

Nor are blanks. Are you saying that the encoding shouldn't
support blanks either?

You should have a better understanding of my needs by now. Perhaps this post
will be the "keystone" for you in that regard.

What the hell is a "code page"?

You know very well of the concept, so stop being facetious.

Not according to any of the dictionaries I've consulted.

Said to Grasshopper: "don't believe all that you read Grasshoppa".

All
give "naïve" as a perfectly correct, native American English
spelling.

That's a false statement. It is predicated upon the notion of pre-existing
definition (the "god win" "argument"?) and that that "definition" is
accepted by the reader/recipient. (The same reasoning is abused in judicial
systems, BTW). Funny you should choose the word 'naive' to try and make your
point! (Grasshoppa). (?)

The context of software development is that each programming
language defines a set of characters it accepts. Fortran used
the least, I believe---it was designed so that you could get six
6 bit characters in a word. C and C++ require close to a
million.

My application(s) require(s) no more than 7-bit ASCII. Why continue trying
to sell me a combine when I don't own a farm?

Your talk about letters is what is misleading. I'm just
pointing out that it's irrelevant.

You're not pointing out anything. English has 26 characters in its alphabet.
While English-speaking people MAY recognize foreign words or symbols or
characters, it is irrelevant to this discussion thread because the context
was given that 7-bit ASCII is adequate and all supersets are irrelevant
therefor. (BTW, if you want the statue back, you have to pay for the
maintenance of the elephant since you "gave" it to "us").

[...]
'naive' has been naturalized into the English language and
does not have/does not require (unless one feels romantic?)
an accent. You were taught French, not English.
Merriam-Webster disagrees with you.

Ah! I mentioned Webster long ago in this thread and discounted
any relavence:

Merriam-Webster is irrelevant to what is correct American
English use?

"use" is not under the glass in this thread. I can and do make up words all
day long (OK, I don't do it all day long) ... OK, maybe a few have caught
on.. but "valley girl speak"? Who cares? (Not my problem.. your's with kids
maybe). But valley-girl variable names will probably obey the rules of
English in source code. If I say "there is a fire in your hair" and choose
not to recognize what I said because it doesn't contain your "preferred
diacritic", it's not my problem.

[---]
If you don't know English well, that's your problem.

You mean if I don't want to accept bastardization/perversion
it's my problem.

I mean that if you don't want to accept generally accepted,
standard usage, it's your problem.

You missed the whole point of the thread. Which is it: YOU are stupid, or
you think everyone else is stupid? It seems it has to be one or the other.
(There of course is another option, but I won't go there).

A serious one, at that,
symptomatic of a serious social maladjustment.

Oooo... bring on the Psych 101 when you can't get your way. (Tempting to
play with you, but you will have to cook to find the answers). No offense
grasshoppa.

[...]
I have to, because my comments where I work now have to be in
French, and French without accents is incomprehensible. The
need is less frequent in English, but it does occur.
Simplify your life: use English (for SW dev at least)!
If you've ever tried to understand English written by a
non-native speaker, you'll realize that it's much simpler to let
them use French (or German, when I worked there).

Exceptional case.

Native English speakers represent less than 5% of the world's
population, which means that being a native English speaker is
the exceptional case.

"Native English" is MUCH different than "English". "the exceptional case" is
exactly that which _I_ define for my application. So your attempt at using
generality as specific argument is quite boring and irrelevant. (I admit
it's a bit fun to wallow as I procrastinate).

 

[Tony]

* James Kanze:

I always found it a bit amusing that the English alphabet officially
has only A through Z, but that the language contains words like
"mæneuver".

"Dialect based upon" is just that. I code in C++. Sure I do: with all my
preprocessor macros trying to get anything useful done? Yeah, it's C++!
(Sure it is).

 

[Tony]

* Richard Herring:

What's the point of an insinuation like that?

I have not expressed any doubt about whether the book uses the 'æ'
spelling, and indicating otherwise is just dishonest (i.e., you are,
above): I was not making a touchy-feely
think-that-perhaps-it-was-like-that /argument/, as you insinuate; I
was just reporting a *fact*.
I think the book edition I have is published by Penguin.

That printed book uses 'æ', while the online text you've found
apparently doesn't, presumably because it's ASCII text (note: ASCII
doesn't have 'æ').
The word 'mæneuver', with 'æ', modulo speling, is in at least one
main English dictionary.



There's also probably a difference between British English and US
English.


It's my impression that the old (original?) spelling used 'æ', but
anyways, I can't recall ever seeingn the word spelled with 'o'.

The "debate" (is there one?) is about character encodings and their
applicability. Not the elephant of liberty.

 

[Tony]

Do you believe that the smiley has some basic and agreed upon
meaning? If so, what is that meaning and where is it defined? I
believe many people use it as a form of negation, kind of an
equivalent of a SNL "not". As far as I am concerned it has just
become an annoying noise glyph which may alter the meaning of what is
said and may not.

Emoticons are just that. They are different from Acticons, perhaps subtlely
and occassionally. ("Get my drift or don't and I don't care if you do or
don't" emoticon here).

 

[Tony]

It means that the preceding sentence isn't to be taken too
seriously.

It must have been the "wink smilie" then (OE-QuoteFix (?) is filtering them
out here). That smilie means different things in different contexts. (Does
Meriam Webster define 'smiley' or 'smilie'?.... surely they are only
confused (being optimistically unrealistic) capitalists).

If the sentence had been spoken, the author would
have been smiling when he said it.

??? Or winking? Now I'm curious about which emoticon you are talking about
because you totally said SOMEthing incorrect above. (Not that inane
trivialities are important, as much as they are better than sitcoms though).

Not really. It means that the statement is being said in a
joking manner.

That's incorrect. A "winkie" is context-specific. It could be flirtatious
(or creepy!) in addition to a RANGE of other implications. There is no
defintion of the emoticon. (Note: the search for defintion is a common
quest, but never taught! Often "capitalised" (to be nice) on).

In some contexts, this might imply that it is
false (but not at all in the same way that the "not" does), but
certainly not in all contexts.

Needs to be at the beginning of the description. Some aliens (surely not
people) will stop reading your above and base things upon it.

It corresponds to something you'd use tone of voice

Most likely not.

or
expression

Vague? You meant more verbage? (You really should have your wife answer the
posts where you think you can fill in for her).

to indicate in spoken English.

I have to laugh, not at you. OK, at you. '

It's used on the net
because the level of English here is often closer to spoken
English than it is to traditional written English.

I don't feel sorry for you.

 

[Tony]

But as I recall the speling in Jack London's novel [...]

and I'm too lazy to check out Oxford's or Merriam Webster [...]

The word maneuver should be in any American English dictionary.

The American Heritage Dictionary [...]

But it's still the Encyclopædia Britannica (which dispite the
name, is published in Chicago).

You "appeal to authority" A LOT, grasshoppa.

 

[Richard Herring]

In message <[email protected]>, Tony <[email protected]>
writes

[...]

I think you need to check the definition of "strawman".

Probably, but you know what I meant.

(And the Welsh alphabet has 28, despite lacking J, K, Q, V, X, Z). So
what? 26 letters alone are not sufficient for writing English.

Who's talking about literary writings?! I'm talking about programming and
engineering.

I'm talking about software-engineering programs that support what my
customers want -- which includes not having the stuff that they type in
garbled because it contains characters that aren't in ASCII.

[...]

That quote is true, at least if you know how to do it. I went on to say:
"no, probably not for you, but indeed it is for me!". So you misquoted me:

I'll admit it was a very selective quote, but its purpose was a reminder
of the *context* - which was a purportedly general-purpose String class
based on wchar_t, but making "7-bit ASCII" assumptions about case
conversions.

do you enjoy taking things out of context and using them opportunistically

(Of course. Using things opportunistically is *good* ;-)

evilly?
[...]

You are free sprinkle hieroglyphics into your source code variable names
rather than using just ASCII. You really should stop trying to get me to do
so though, cuz it ain't gonna ever happen.

Now that *is* a strawman.

 

[Tony]

In message <[email protected]>, Tony
<[email protected]> writes

[...]

I think you need to check the definition of "strawman".

Probably, but you know what I meant.

that conveniently avoids any context; The English alphabet
has exactly 26 letters.

(And the Welsh alphabet has 28, despite lacking J, K, Q, V, X, Z).
So what? 26 letters alone are not sufficient for writing English.

Who's talking about literary writings?! I'm talking about
programming and engineering.

I'm talking about software-engineering programs that support what my
customers want -- which includes not having the stuff that they type
in garbled because it contains characters that aren't in ASCII.
Politics.

[...]

No, you are wrong: the context is the context, no some contrived
generality
you expect some dummy to believe.

Nor is it what you want to redefine it to be, as any "dummy" can
discover by simply reading the thread. "7-bit ASCII is your
friend".

That quote is true, at least if you know how to do it. I went on to
say: "no, probably not for you, but indeed it is for me!". So you
misquoted me:

I'll admit it was a very selective quote,

It was not a quote at all: it was opportunistically evil intent. (You made
your bed, now sleep in it). You did bad, go to jail for X years. See ya in a
few years (I sure hope not).

 

[Richard Herring]

In message <[email protected]>, Tony
[...]

I think you need to check the definition of "strawman".

Probably, but you know what I meant.


that conveniently avoids any context; The English alphabet
has exactly 26 letters.

(And the Welsh alphabet has 28, despite lacking J, K, Q, V, X, Z).
So what? 26 letters alone are not sufficient for writing English.

Who's talking about literary writings?! I'm talking about
programming and engineering.

I'm talking about software-engineering programs that support what my
customers want -- which includes not having the stuff that they type
in garbled because it contains characters that aren't in ASCII.

Politics.

So one should alienate the customer and go out of business, because
giving them what they contracted for is "politics"? Maybe in your world.

[...]

No, you are wrong: the context is the context, no some contrived
generality
you expect some dummy to believe.

Nor is it what you want to redefine it to be, as any "dummy" can
discover by simply reading the thread. "7-bit ASCII is your
friend".

That quote is true, at least if you know how to do it. I went on to
say: "no, probably not for you, but indeed it is for me!". So you
misquoted me:

I'll admit it was a very selective quote,

It was not a quote at all:

Sure. Citing someone's precise words is not a quote.

it was opportunistically evil intent. (You made
your bed, now sleep in it). You did bad, go to jail for X years. See ya in a
few years (I sure hope not).

?

 

[Tony]

In message <[email protected]>, Tony

In message <[email protected]>, Tony

[...]

I think you need to check the definition of "strawman".

Probably, but you know what I meant.


that conveniently avoids any context; The English alphabet
has exactly 26 letters.

(And the Welsh alphabet has 28, despite lacking J, K, Q, V, X, Z).
So what? 26 letters alone are not sufficient for writing English.

Who's talking about literary writings?! I'm talking about
programming and engineering.

I'm talking about software-engineering programs that support what my
customers want -- which includes not having the stuff that they type
in garbled because it contains characters that aren't in ASCII.

Politics.

So one should alienate the customer and go out of business, because
giving them what they contracted for is "politics"? Maybe in your
world.

It was politics because you choose to promote your narrow point of view
instead of recognizing alternative needs. You seem to be "arguing for
argument's sake". If my requirements are satisfied with ASCII, then all your
verbage is bogus.

[...]

No, you are wrong: the context is the context, no some contrived
generality
you expect some dummy to believe.

Nor is it what you want to redefine it to be, as any "dummy" can
discover by simply reading the thread. "7-bit ASCII is your
friend".

That quote is true, at least if you know how to do it. I went on to
say: "no, probably not for you, but indeed it is for me!". So you
misquoted me:

I'll admit it was a very selective quote,

It was not a quote at all:

Sure. Citing someone's precise words is not a quote.

Exactly correct: a passage of text taken out of context is not a quote. (And
this a programming group?! Semantics vs. syntax still a "gotcha" for some
apparently (or someone "has agenda")!)

?

Ponder it more, I responded to your remarks above (does "the shoe fit"?).

 

[Richard Herring]

Richard Herring wrote:
In message <[email protected]>, Tony

In message <[email protected]>, Tony

[...]

I think you need to check the definition of "strawman".

Probably, but you know what I meant.


that conveniently avoids any context; The English alphabet
has exactly 26 letters.

(And the Welsh alphabet has 28, despite lacking J, K, Q, V, X, Z).
So what? 26 letters alone are not sufficient for writing English.

Who's talking about literary writings?! I'm talking about
programming and engineering.

I'm talking about software-engineering programs that support what my
customers want -- which includes not having the stuff that they type
in garbled because it contains characters that aren't in ASCII.

Politics.

So one should alienate the customer and go out of business, because
giving them what they contracted for is "politics"? Maybe in your
world.

It was politics because you choose to promote your narrow

*My* view is "narrow"? [*] ROFL.

point of view
instead of recognizing alternative needs. You seem to be "arguing for
argument's sake".
P.K.B.

If my requirements are satisfied with ASCII, then all your
verbage is bogus.

And the requirements of the rest of the world don't matter. I see.


[*] just to preserve a veneer of topicality:

7-bit ASCII is narrow. UTF-8 is just about narrow. All other
manifestations of Unicode are surely wide, possibly even too wide for
wchar_t.

 

[Tony]

In message <[email protected]>, Tony
Richard Herring wrote:
In message <[email protected]>, Tony

In message <[email protected]>, Tony

[...]

I think you need to check the definition of "strawman".

Probably, but you know what I meant.


that conveniently avoids any context; The English alphabet
has exactly 26 letters.

(And the Welsh alphabet has 28, despite lacking J, K, Q, V, X, Z).
So what? 26 letters alone are not sufficient for writing English.

Who's talking about literary writings?! I'm talking about
programming and engineering.

I'm talking about software-engineering programs that support what my
customers want -- which includes not having the stuff that they type
in garbled because it contains characters that aren't in ASCII.

Politics.

So one should alienate the customer and go out of business, because
giving them what they contracted for is "politics"? Maybe in your
world.

It was politics because you choose to promote your narrow

*My* view is "narrow"? [*] ROFL.

point of view
instead of recognizing alternative needs. You seem to be "arguing for
argument's sake".
P.K.B.

If my requirements are satisfied with ASCII, then all your
verbage is bogus.

And the requirements of the rest of the world don't matter. I see.[/QUOTE]

What is your point in being extremist? ASCII (some variant thereof, US-ASCII
most noteworthy) is the workhorse. Unicode is a special-purpose
specification. Unicode does not subsume ASCII in practical implementation
("practicality of programmers" ponderance omitted).

[*] just to preserve a veneer of topicality:

7-bit ASCII is narrow. UTF-8 is just about narrow. All other
manifestations of Unicode are surely wide, possibly even too wide for
wchar_t.