On Tue, 31 May 2011 01:32:01 +0100, harrismh777 <harrismh...@charter.net>
wrote:
Steven D'Aprano wrote:
Compatibility is inherently continuous, a matter
of degree.
Compatible by degrees is incompatible. Just 'how' incompatible
determines whether the factor(s) are utterly useless, or just difficult
to negotiate.
(uh, oh,... me suspects another analogy fallacy coming up... )
This is especially true when it comes to languages, both natural and
programming.
( Yup... analogy fallacy for Ænglisc speakers... )
I don't know about you, but I speak English not "Anglish". This is how an
aesc is pronounced, after all.
British English and American English are perhaps 99.5%
compatible, but "table a motion" means completely opposite things in
British and American English. (In Britain, it means to deal with it
immediately; in the USA, it means to postpone it.) Should we conclude
from this that British and American English are "different languages"
and
"completely incompatible"?
We Americans have not spoken 'English' in well over two hundred
years... :) roflol
Quite the contrary, in fact. Much American usage of English actually
better preserves the styles of eighteenth century English usage, having
managed to avoid some of the "corrections" of Victorian grammarians.
However, I guarantee that if I'm dumped unaided in Piccadilly I'll
be able to hail a cab, pay my £12.00 and get myself to Liverpool Street
Station, find the bathroom, and be on the correct train just in time for
dinner, all without looking into the English dictionary.
And I guarantee that you'd get odd looks for at least one of those. You
may not notice; we Brits are used to translating the large amount of US TV
we get back into British English.
On the other hand (playing along with this analogy fallacy) if I
dump a python newbie unaided in the middle of 2.5 and ask them to format
a simple polytonic Greek unicode string and output it with print to
stdout (redirected to a file) they will fail... maybe even if they have
a dictionary !
Now this is an analogy fallacy, and an obvious one at that.
--
Rhodri James *-* Wildebeest Herder to the Masses
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
