Re: Gmail eats Python

[Zachary Ware]

On Jul 25, 2015 11:35 AM, "Laura Creighton"  wrote:
>
> Gmail eats Python.
>
> We just saw this mail back from Sebastian Luque which says in part:
>
> >>> try: all_your_code_which_is_happy_with_non_scalars except
> >>> WhateverErrorPythonGivesYouWhenYouTryThisWithScalars:
> >>> whatever_you_want_to_do_when_this_happens
>
> Ow!  Gmail is understanding the >>> I stuck in as 'this is from the
> python console as a quoting marker and thinks it can reflow that.
>
> I think that splunqe must already have gmail set for plain text or
> else even worse mangling must show up.
>
> How do you teach gmail not to reflow what it thinks of as
> 'other people's quoted text'?

Add same whitespace in front of the >'s, in plain text mode:

   >>> def test(): pass
   ...
   >>> print('Hi world')
   Hi world
   >>>

(Hopefully that will work from my phone)

--
Zach
(On a phone)
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Sat, 25 Jul 2015 11:51:49 -0500, Zachary Ware writes:
>On Jul 25, 2015 11:35 AM, "Laura Creighton"  wrote:
>>
>> Gmail eats Python.
>>
>> We just saw this mail back from Sebastian Luque which says in part:
>>
>> >>> try: all_your_code_which_is_happy_with_non_scalars except
>> >>> WhateverErrorPythonGivesYouWhenYouTryThisWithScalars:
>> >>> whatever_you_want_to_do_when_this_happens
>>
>> Ow!  Gmail is understanding the >>> I stuck in as 'this is from the
>> python console as a quoting marker and thinks it can reflow that.
>>
>> I think that splunqe must already have gmail set for plain text or
>> else even worse mangling must show up.
>>
>> How do you teach gmail not to reflow what it thinks of as
>> 'other people's quoted text'?
>
>Add same whitespace in front of the >'s, in plain text mode:
>
>   >>> def test(): pass
>   ...
>   >>> print('Hi world')
>   Hi world
>   >>>
>
>(Hopefully that will work from my phone)
>
>--
>Zach
>(On a phone)


Worked great.

So it was my fault by sending him a reply with >>> to the far left.
I need to indent my text by some whitespace after I paste
in the results from a Python console?

Thank you Zach, I had no idea.  I will change my behaviour.

Laura
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Jussi Piitulainen]

Zachary Ware writes:

> On Jul 25, 2015 11:35 AM, "Laura Creighton" wrote:
>>
>> Gmail eats Python.
>>
>> We just saw this mail back from Sebastian Luque which says in part:
>>
>> >>> try: all_your_code_which_is_happy_with_non_scalars except
>> >>> WhateverErrorPythonGivesYouWhenYouTryThisWithScalars:
>> >>> whatever_you_want_to_do_when_this_happens
>>
>> Ow!  Gmail is understanding the >>> I stuck in as 'this is
>> from the python console as a quoting marker and thinks it can reflow
>> that.
>>
>> I think that splunqe must already have gmail set for plain text or
>> else even worse mangling must show up.
>>
>> How do you teach gmail not to reflow what it thinks of as
>> 'other people's quoted text'?
>
> Add same whitespace in front of the >'s, in plain text mode:
>
>    >>> def test(): pass
>    ...
>    >>> print('Hi world')
>    Hi world
>    >>>
>
> (Hopefully that will work from my phone)

Just in case anyone cares, Gnus shows me those indentations as octal
codes, \302\240\302\240 (followed by one ASCII space). I guess a
\302\240 is a NO-BREAK SPACE in UTF-8, and I guess Gnus does not know
this because there is no charset specification in the headers. That
seems to be missing whenever I see these codes instead of properly
rendered characters and bother to check the headers.

Has the world adopted UTF-8 as the default charset now or what? (I'll be
only glad to hear that it has, if it has, but a reference to some sort
of internet standard would be nice.)
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Jussi Piitulainen]

Jussi Piitulainen writes:

> Zachary Ware writes:

[snip what I quoted from him]

Oh well - Gnus made me go through some hoops to send the characters that
were in the unknown-to-it encoding, and then mangled them. This is what
I had added:

> Just in case anyone cares, Gnus shows me those indentations as octal
> codes, \302\240\302\240 (followed by one ASCII space). I guess a
> \302\240 is a NO-BREAK SPACE in UTF-8, and I guess Gnus does not know
> this because there is no charset specification in the headers. That
> seems to be missing whenever I see these codes instead of properly
> rendered characters and bother to check the headers.
>
> Has the world adopted UTF-8 as the default charset now or what? (I'll
> be only glad to hear that it has, if it has, but a reference to some
> sort of internet standard would be nice.)

And any information is appreciated. Thanks.
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Sat, 25 Jul 2015 20:52:38 +0300, Jussi Piitulainen writes:
>Jussi Piitulainen writes:
>> Has the world adopted UTF-8 as the default charset now or what? (I'll
>> be only glad to hear that it has, if it has, but a reference to some
>> sort of internet standard would be nice.)

I don't think so.  Americans and other English speakers still love ASCII.
but the ISO charsets are rapidly going the way of the buggywhip. :)
http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/English_list.php

Laura

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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Jon Ribbens]

On 2015-07-25, Jussi Piitulainen  wrote:
> Just in case anyone cares, Gnus shows me those indentations as octal
> codes, \302\240\302\240 (followed by one ASCII space). I guess a
> \302\240 is a NO-BREAK SPACE in UTF-8, and I guess Gnus does not know
> this because there is no charset specification in the headers.

It is not true that there were was no charset specification
in the headers of the post you were responding to. It was
specified as UTF-8.
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Jussi Piitulainen :

>>    >>> def test(): pass
>>    ...
>>    >>> print('Hi world')
>>    Hi world
>>    >>>
>
> Just in case anyone cares, Gnus shows me those indentations as octal
> codes, \302\240\302\240 (followed by one ASCII space). I guess a
> \302\240 is a NO-BREAK SPACE in UTF-8, and I guess Gnus does not know
> this because there is no charset specification in the headers. That
> seems to be missing whenever I see these codes instead of properly
> rendered characters and bother to check the headers.
>
> Has the world adopted UTF-8 as the default charset now or what? (I'll
> be only glad to hear that it has, if it has, but a reference to some
> sort of internet standard would be nice.)

The gnus command

   C-u g

displays the raw message.

It demonstrates that the posting was sent as

   Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=001a1134d474c99321051bb5ef45

The first part has:

   Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

The second part has:

   Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
   Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

The text/plain variant expresses the indentations with plain whitespace
(SPC) characters. However, the text/html variant has:

   =C2=A0=C2=A0 >>> def test(): pass
   =C2=A0=C2=A0 ... 
   =C2=A0=C2=A0 >>> print('Hi world')
   =C2=A0=C2=A0 Hi world
   =C2=A0=C2=A0 >>>

=C2=A0 stands for '\u00a0' (NO-BREAK SPACE).

When I have Gnus display the HTML variant, the indentation is not
displayed at all. I don't know why.

(It's another question what place text/html has on this forum in the
first place.)


Marko
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Zachary Ware]

On Jul 25, 2015 2:45 PM, "Marko Rauhamaa"  wrote:
> (It's another question what place text/html has on this forum in the
> first place.)

If the gmail app on my phone had the option, I'd only send the plain text.
As is, I'm just glad it does send a plain text version :)

--
Zach
(On a phone)
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Ben Finney]

Laura Creighton  writes:

> So it was my fault by sending him a reply with >>> to the far left.

No, it was Google Mail's failt for messing with the content of the
message.

Never forget that these services are meant to serve us. When they fail
to do so because they're violating internet standards, it's not our
fault.

> Thank you Zach, I had no idea. I will change my behaviour.

Google can't force you to change your behaviour; they only have that
power if you give it to them.

-- 
 \   “People come up to me and say, ‘Emo, do people really come up |
  `\to you?’” —Emo Philips |
_o__)  |
Ben Finney

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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Ben Finney]

Zachary Ware  writes:

> If the gmail app on my phone had the option, I'd only send the plain
> text.

Isn't that a good reason to avoid composing email messages on a program
that lacks the correct capability?

If the GMail app lacks the ability to send plain text, there are better
alternatives (including avoiding GMail entirely).

-- 
 \ “If I had known what it would be like to have it all... I might |
  `\ have been willing to settle for less.” —Jane Wagner, via Lily |
_o__)   Tomlin |
Ben Finney

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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Jul 26, 2015 at 10:52 AM, Ben Finney  wrote:
> Zachary Ware  writes:
>
>> If the gmail app on my phone had the option, I'd only send the plain
>> text.
>
> Isn't that a good reason to avoid composing email messages on a program
> that lacks the correct capability?
>
> If the GMail app lacks the ability to send plain text, there are better
> alternatives (including avoiding GMail entirely).

Phones suck. If you can't do stuff on your phone because it's all
locked down, take a hammer to your phone and use a device that gives
you more freedom. Most people I know claim to own phones, but really
just use what they're given; the phone provider truly owns those
phones.

ChrisA
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Grant Edwards]

On 2015-07-25, Laura Creighton  wrote:
> Gmail eats Python.
>
> We just saw this mail back from Sebastian Luque which says in part:
>
 try: all_your_code_which_is_happy_with_non_scalars except
 WhateverErrorPythonGivesYouWhenYouTryThisWithScalars:
 whatever_you_want_to_do_when_this_happens
>
> Ow!

[...]

You use mutt or something else decent as your MUA.

--
Grant


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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 26 Jul 2015 02:34 am, Laura Creighton wrote:

> Gmail eats Python.
> 
> We just saw this mail back from Sebastian Luque which says in part:
> 
 try: all_your_code_which_is_happy_with_non_scalars except
 WhateverErrorPythonGivesYouWhenYouTryThisWithScalars:
 whatever_you_want_to_do_when_this_happens
> 
> Ow!  Gmail is understanding the >>> I stuck in as 'this is from the
> python console as a quoting marker and thinks it can reflow that.


That's one of the reasons I have my Python prompt set to "py> ". 




-- 
Steven

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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 26 Jul 2015 03:47 am, Jussi Piitulainen wrote:

> Just in case anyone cares, Gnus shows me those indentations as octal
> codes, \302\240\302\240 (followed by one ASCII space). I guess a
> \302\240 is a NO-BREAK SPACE in UTF-8, and I guess Gnus does not know
> this because there is no charset specification in the headers. That
> seems to be missing whenever I see these codes instead of properly
> rendered characters and bother to check the headers.

Some of us care :-)

Zachary's post that you are referring to does have the charset declared, but
it uses individual declarations for each of the multipart/alternative
parts:


--001a1134d474c99321051bb5ef45
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8


--001a1134d474c99321051bb5ef45
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable


On the other hand, your post sent from Gnus is lying. Despite containing
non-ASCII bytes (i.e. octal \302\240), it sends these headers:


Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit


US-ASCII is 7-bit only and only defines values for ord \0 through \177 in
octal.


-- 
Steven

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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Jussi Piitulainen]

Marko Rauhamaa writes:

> Jussi Piitulainen writes:

>> Just in case anyone cares, Gnus shows me those indentations as octal
>> codes, \302\240\302\240 (followed by one ASCII space). I guess a
>> \302\240 is a NO-BREAK SPACE in UTF-8, and I guess Gnus does not know
>> this because there is no charset specification in the headers. That
>> seems to be missing whenever I see these codes instead of properly
>> rendered characters and bother to check the headers.

> The gnus command
>
>C-u g
>
> displays the raw message.

Thanks! I was just typing t to see what I thought were the full headers.

> It demonstrates that the posting was sent as
>
>Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=001a1134d474c99321051bb5ef45
>
> The first part has:
>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> The second part has:
>
>Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Yes, with C-u g, I see them.

> The text/plain variant expresses the indentations with plain
> whitespace (SPC) characters. However, the text/html variant has:
>
>=C2=A0=C2=A0 >>> def test(): pass
>=C2=A0=C2=A0 ... 
>=C2=A0=C2=A0 >>> print('Hi world')
>=C2=A0=C2=A0 Hi world
>=C2=A0=C2=A0 >>>
>
> =C2=A0 stands for '\u00a0' (NO-BREAK SPACE).

I suppose that's a valid HTML fragment when the charset is declared, but
the Gnus version I use fails to use the charset information when it
renders the message. Annoying that it chooses text/html over text/plain
and then fails. (Probably I can customize it now that I have a precise
idea of what it is that is going wrong.)

> When I have Gnus display the HTML variant, the indentation is not
> displayed at all. I don't know why.

So many ways to fail :)
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Jussi Piitulainen]

Laura Creighton writes:

> In a message of Sat, 25 Jul 2015 20:52:38 +0300, Jussi Piitulainen writes:
>>Jussi Piitulainen writes:
>>> Has the world adopted UTF-8 as the default charset now or what?
>>> (I'll be only glad to hear that it has, if it has, but a reference
>>> to some sort of internet standard would be nice.)
>
> I don't think so.  Americans and other English speakers still love
> ASCII.  but the ISO charsets are rapidly going the way of the
> buggywhip. :)
> http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/English_list.php

I thought the ISO-8859 sets are going away in favour of UTF-8, and I
welcome that development. ASCII is still fine as a subset of UTF-8.
What's not fine is the use of encoded characters outside ASCII without a
corresponding declaration (possibly a default) of the encoding (or my
mail reader failing to understand that the declaration is there).

But how is that link to a set of language codes relevant?
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Rustom Mody]

On Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 10:31:20 AM UTC+5:30, Jussi Piitulainen wrote:
> Marko Rauhamaa writes:
> 
> > Jussi Piitulainen writes:
> 
> >> Just in case anyone cares, Gnus shows me those indentations as octal
> >> codes, \302\240\302\240 (followed by one ASCII space). I guess a
> >> \302\240 is a NO-BREAK SPACE in UTF-8, and I guess Gnus does not know
> >> this because there is no charset specification in the headers. That
> >> seems to be missing whenever I see these codes instead of properly
> >> rendered characters and bother to check the headers.
> 
> > The gnus command
> >
> >C-u g
> >
> > displays the raw message.
> 
> Thanks! I was just typing t to see what I thought were the full headers.
> 
> > It demonstrates that the posting was sent as
> >
> >Content-Type: multipart/alternative; 
> > boundary=001a1134d474c99321051bb5ef45
> >
> > The first part has:
> >
> >Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
> >
> > The second part has:
> >
> >Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
> >Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
> 
> Yes, with C-u g, I see them.
> 
> > The text/plain variant expresses the indentations with plain
> > whitespace (SPC) characters. However, the text/html variant has:
> >
> >=C2=A0=C2=A0 >>> def test(): pass
> >=C2=A0=C2=A0 ... 
> >=C2=A0=C2=A0 >>> print('Hi world')
> >=C2=A0=C2=A0 Hi world
> >=C2=A0=C2=A0 >>>
> >
> > =C2=A0 stands for '\u00a0' (NO-BREAK SPACE).
> 
> I suppose that's a valid HTML fragment when the charset is declared, but
> the Gnus version I use fails to use the charset information when it
> renders the message. Annoying that it chooses text/html over text/plain
> and then fails. (Probably I can customize it now that I have a precise
> idea of what it is that is going wrong.)

Emacs belongs to the age when choice (and freedom, and democracy and brotherhood
and ...) are an unqualified good.
A 500-page gnus manual used to be the height of cuteness -- kittens, milk and 
all.
Not so post https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice

> So many ways to fail :)
Combinatorially increases with choices... Mostly spurious ones.

JFTR: Ive been using emacs for 20+ years.  And I have the increasing feeling
that my students are getting fedup with it (and me).  Used Idle for my last 
python
course without too much grief.  If only it were an option for 25 programming 
languages, and org-mode and unicode/devanagari/tex input and.
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Jul 26, 2015 at 3:28 PM, Rustom Mody  wrote:
> JFTR: Ive been using emacs for 20+ years.  And I have the increasing feeling
> that my students are getting fedup with it (and me).  Used Idle for my last 
> python
> course without too much grief.  If only it were an option for 25 programming 
> languages, and org-mode and unicode/devanagari/tex input and.

Not sure whether you're making the point deliberately or accidentally,
but that's exactly why emacs is so big and heavy: "if only, if only".
Simpler things do less.

ChrisA
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Jussi Piitulainen]

Steven D'Aprano writes:

> On Sun, 26 Jul 2015 03:47 am, Jussi Piitulainen wrote:
>
>> Just in case anyone cares, Gnus shows me those indentations as octal
>> codes, \302\240\302\240 (followed by one ASCII space). I guess a
>> \302\240 is a NO-BREAK SPACE in UTF-8, and I guess Gnus does not know
>> this because there is no charset specification in the headers. That
>> seems to be missing whenever I see these codes instead of properly
>> rendered characters and bother to check the headers.
>
> Some of us care :-)

Thank you.

> On the other hand, your post sent from Gnus is lying. Despite
> containing non-ASCII bytes (i.e. octal \302\240), it sends these
> headers:
>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>
> US-ASCII is 7-bit only and only defines values for ord \0 through \177
> in octal.

Yes. Gnus made me go through a dialogue to send the message, and I
didn't understand what all the options meant. So I probably told it to
lie. My bad.
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Ian Kelly]

On Jul 25, 2015 8:36 AM, "Laura Creighton"  wrote:
> Ow!  Gmail is understanding the >>> I stuck in as 'this is from the
> python console as a quoting marker and thinks it can reflow that.

You didn't use >>> in the email that I saw. That's actually three levels of
quoting: one added in your reply to yourself, the second in Sebastian's
reply to your reply, and the third apparently added in your first post in
this thread.
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Rustom Mody]

On Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 11:05:14 AM UTC+5:30, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 26, 2015 at 3:28 PM, Rustom Mody  wrote:
> > JFTR: Ive been using emacs for 20+ years.  And I have the increasing feeling
> > that my students are getting fedup with it (and me).  Used Idle for my last 
> > python
> > course without too much grief.  If only it were an option for 25 
> > programming languages, and org-mode and unicode/devanagari/tex input and.
> 
> Not sure whether you're making the point deliberately or accidentally,
> but that's exactly why emacs is so big and heavy: "if only, if only".
> Simpler things do less.

Well Almost.
Emacs used to stand for "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping"
At a time when 8 MB was large. Is it today?
So let me ask you:
Do you not use ½ dozen (at least) languages?
And their interpreters (when they exist)
And their ancilliary tools (make autoconf etc)
And do you not type plain text?
Emails?
PIM (reminders, timesheets and planning)
Docs (more fancy than plain text, maybe libreoffice/MS/latex...)
Lilypond?
Use, experiment, play-around with (non-ASCII) unicode?

If you have one app to do them all, I'd like (and pay!) for it
If not I bet they are mutually inconsistent.

No...
Emacs is big (its not actually) and heavy (yeah) because there's no BDFL
to clean up the mess and take the flak.
Lehman's law of software deterioration (7th in this list
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehman%27s_laws_of_software_evolution )
is about as inexorable as entropy in thermodynamics
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Jul 26, 2015 at 4:15 PM, Rustom Mody  wrote:
> Well Almost.
> Emacs used to stand for "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping"
> At a time when 8 MB was large. Is it today?
> So let me ask you:
> Do you not use ½ dozen (at least) languages?
> And their interpreters (when they exist)
> And their ancilliary tools (make autoconf etc)
> And do you not type plain text?
> Emails?
> PIM (reminders, timesheets and planning)
> Docs (more fancy than plain text, maybe libreoffice/MS/latex...)
> Lilypond?
> Use, experiment, play-around with (non-ASCII) unicode?
>
> If you have one app to do them all, I'd like (and pay!) for it
> If not I bet they are mutually inconsistent.
>

For the most part, I use a single text editor. But all their ancillary
tools are separate. Emacs tries to be absolutely everything, not just
editing text files; that's why it's big. Size isn't just a matter of
disk or RAM footprint, it's also (and much more importantly) UI
complexity.

It's a trade-off, of course. If you constantly have to switch programs
to do your work, that's a different form of UI complexity.

ChrisA
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Ian Kelly]

On Jul 25, 2015 4:51 PM, "Ben Finney"  wrote:
>
> Laura Creighton  writes:
>
> > So it was my fault by sending him a reply with >>> to the far left.
>
> No, it was Google Mail's failt for messing with the content of the
> message.
>
> Never forget that these services are meant to serve us. When they fail
> to do so because they're violating internet standards, it's not our
> fault.

What Internet standard is being violated by reflowing text content in
the message body?

I'm also skeptical that this was caused by Gmail, which I've never
seen do this and did not do this when I tried to repro it just now.
Also, unless I'm misinterpreting the headers of the message in
question, it appears to have been sent via Gmane, not Gmail.
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Chris Angelico :

> Emacs tries to be absolutely everything, not just editing text files;
> that's why it's big.

I use emacs for most of my text inputting needs. Sometimes I even use it
to type in web forms (prepare it in emacs and copy the text over into
the form).

I'm typing now. Hence, I'm using emacs. It's great that I don't have to
settle for less.

No matter what I'm typing, M-$ spell-checks the word under the cursor.
No matter what I'm typing, M-x picture-mode allows me to draw a picture
in ASCII graphics. And C-x ( starts a macro -- immensely useful in many
circumstances.

Emacs also works over text terminal connections. I use it all the time
to access virtual machines at the office as well as my home machine from
overseas.


Marko
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Sun, 26 Jul 2015 00:58:08 -, Grant Edwards writes:

>You use mutt or something else decent as your MUA.
>

I do -- the problem is all the gmail users out there.

Laura
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Rustom Mody]

On Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 12:25:42 PM UTC+5:30, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
> Chris Angelico:
> 
> > Emacs tries to be absolutely everything, not just editing text files;
> > that's why it's big.
> 
> I use emacs for most of my text inputting needs. Sometimes I even use it
> to type in web forms (prepare it in emacs and copy the text over into
> the form).
> 
> I'm typing now. Hence, I'm using emacs. It's great that I don't have to
> settle for less.
> 
> No matter what I'm typing, M-$ spell-checks the word under the cursor.
> No matter what I'm typing, M-x picture-mode allows me to draw a picture
> in ASCII graphics. And C-x ( starts a macro -- immensely useful in many
> circumstances.
> 
> Emacs also works over text terminal connections. I use it all the time
> to access virtual machines at the office as well as my home machine from
> overseas.

Emacs 'tries to be everything' in exactly the same way that a 'general purpose
programming language' is too general and by pretending to solve all problems
actually solves none (until you hire a programmer).

Problem with emacs (culture) is that its aficionados assume that a superb 
conceptual design trumps technological relevance, UI clunkiness etc. Which is 
true... within reasonable limits.

For something a little more contemporary (and successful) than mail clients
here's emacs doing git: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zobx3T7hGNA

[Did you notice that you used the locutions 'M-$', 'M-x'?
What sense does this 80s terminology make to an emacs uninitiate in 2015?
>From seeing my 20-year-olf students suffer all this combined with the 
hopelessness of convincing the emacs folks that we are in 2015, not 1980, I 
conclude this is a losing battle
]
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Rustom Mody :

> Emacs 'tries to be everything' in exactly the same way that a 'general
> purpose programming language' is too general and by pretending to
> solve all problems actually solves none (until you hire a programmer).

Emacs isn't too general. It's just right.

> Problem with emacs (culture) is that its aficionados assume that a
> superb conceptual design trumps technological relevance,

It's relevant to me every day, for business and pleasure.

> [Did you notice that you used the locutions 'M-$', 'M-x'? What sense
> does this 80s terminology make to an emacs uninitiate in 2015?

They can be initiated in mere seconds to that esoteric knowledge.

> From seeing my 20-year-olf students suffer all this

What do your students suffer from? The beauty of the matter is that they
can use any editor they like. They don't have to like or use emacs.

(In some shops you actually virtually *have* to use Eclipse or Visual
Studio or the some such thing. That *is* painful.)

> combined with the hopelessness of convincing the emacs folks that we
> are in 2015, not 1980,

What do you need to convince emacs folks about? Emacs isn't perfect at
everything, but the emacs developers have kept it admirably up to date.
It has been following the quirks of Java, git and MS Exchange even if it
has been an uphill battle.

> I conclude this is a losing battle

What would you like to achieve, exactly?


Marko
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Cameron Simpson]

On 25Jul2015 22:43, Ian Kelly  wrote:

On Jul 25, 2015 4:51 PM, "Ben Finney"  wrote:

Laura Creighton  writes:
> So it was my fault by sending him a reply with >>> to the far left.

No, it was Google Mail's failt for messing with the content of the
message.


Specificly, by manking the text without leave(*).


What Internet standard is being violated by reflowing text content in
the message body?


RFC3676: http://tools.ietf.org/rfcmarkup?doc=3676
See also: http://joeclark.org/ffaq.html

There is a variant on plain old text/plain, namely the format= parameter.  
(This message is using it.) If you set it to format=flowed then the user agent 
is allowed to reflow te text to fit the display width. It also specifies a 
tighter interpretation of the quoted-message indentation markers (i.e. the 
">>>") allow for reflow of the quoted material as well.



I'm also skeptical that this was caused by Gmail, which I've never
seen do this and did not do this when I tried to repro it just now.
Also, unless I'm misinterpreting the headers of the message in
question, it appears to have been sent via Gmane, not Gmail.


Who knows if it was caused by GMail. Hard to tell at this point.

(*) However, it does look like something may have treated a plain text message 
as plain text in format=flowed form.


Or perhaps some user agent has just gone rogue.

Cheers,
Cameron Simpson 

in rec.moto, jsh wrote:

Dan Nitschke wrote:
> Ged Martin wrote:
> > On Sat, 17 May 1997 16:53:33 +, Dan Nitschke scribbled:
> > >(And you stay *out* of my dreams, you deviant little
> > >weirdo.)
> > Yeah, yeah, that's what you're saying in _public_
> Feh. You know nothing of my dreams. I dream entirely in text (New Century
> Schoolbook bold oblique 14 point), and never in color. I once dreamed I
> was walking down a flowchart of my own code, and a waterfall of semicolons
> was chasing me. (I hid behind a global variable until they went by.)
You write code in a proportional serif? No wonder you got extra
semicolons falling all over the place.

No, I *dream* about writing code in a proportional serif font.
It's much more exciting than my real life.
/* dan: THE Anti-Ged -- Ignorant Yank (tm) #1, none-%er #7 */
Dan Nitschke  pedan...@best.com  nitsc...@redbrick.com
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Cameron Simpson]

On 26Jul2015 09:02, Laura Creighton  wrote:

In a message of Sun, 26 Jul 2015 00:58:08 -, Grant Edwards writes:

You use mutt or something else decent as your MUA.


I do -- the problem is all the gmail users out there.


Take heart - gmail used to do much worse than this:-)

Cheers,
Cameron Simpson 
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Rustom Mody]

On Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 2:06:00 PM UTC+5:30, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
> Rustom Mody :
> 
> > Emacs 'tries to be everything' in exactly the same way that a 'general
> > purpose programming language' is too general and by pretending to
> > solve all problems actually solves none (until you hire a programmer).
> 
> Emacs isn't too general. It's just right.
> 
> > Problem with emacs (culture) is that its aficionados assume that a
> > superb conceptual design trumps technological relevance,
> 
> It's relevant to me every day, for business and pleasure.
> 
> > [Did you notice that you used the locutions 'M-$', 'M-x'? What sense
> > does this 80s terminology make to an emacs uninitiate in 2015?
> 
> They can be initiated in mere seconds to that esoteric knowledge.

You are being obtuse Marko!

Yeah that 'M-' is what everyone calls Alt can be conveyed in a few seconds
But there are a hundred completely useless pieces of comtemporary-to-emacs
inconsistency:
- What everyone calls a window, emacs calls a frame
- And what emacs calls a window, everyone calls a pane
- What everyone does with C-x emacs does with C-w (and woe betide if you mix 
that up)
- What everyone calls head (of a list) emacs calls Car (Toyota?)

> 
> > From seeing my 20-year-olf students suffer all this
> 
> What do your students suffer from? The beauty of the matter is that they
> can use any editor they like. They don't have to like or use emacs.
> 
> (In some shops you actually virtually *have* to use Eclipse or Visual
> Studio or the some such thing. That *is* painful.)
> 
> > combined with the hopelessness of convincing the emacs folks that we
> > are in 2015, not 1980,
> 
> What do you need to convince emacs folks about? Emacs isn't perfect at
> everything, but the emacs developers have kept it admirably up to date.
> It has been following the quirks of Java, git and MS Exchange even if it
> has been an uphill battle.
> 
> > I conclude this is a losing battle
> 
> What would you like to achieve, exactly?

Some attitude correction?
That emacs starts its tutorial showing how to use C-p and C-n for what
everyone uses arrows is bad enough.
That the arrow-keys are later found to work quite alright is even worse
and speaks of a ridiculous attitude
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[alister]

On Sun, 26 Jul 2015 01:50:21 -0700, Rustom Mody wrote:

> On Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 2:06:00 PM UTC+5:30, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
>> Rustom Mody :
>> 
>> > Emacs 'tries to be everything' in exactly the same way that a
>> > 'general purpose programming language' is too general and by
>> > pretending to solve all problems actually solves none (until you hire
>> > a programmer).
>> 
>> Emacs isn't too general. It's just right.
>> 
>> > Problem with emacs (culture) is that its aficionados assume that a
>> > superb conceptual design trumps technological relevance,
>> 
>> It's relevant to me every day, for business and pleasure.
>> 
>> > [Did you notice that you used the locutions 'M-$', 'M-x'? What sense
>> > does this 80s terminology make to an emacs uninitiate in 2015?
>> 
>> They can be initiated in mere seconds to that esoteric knowledge.
> 
> You are being obtuse Marko!
> 
> Yeah that 'M-' is what everyone calls Alt can be conveyed in a few
> seconds But there are a hundred completely useless pieces of
> comtemporary-to-emacs inconsistency:
> - What everyone calls a window, emacs calls a frame - And what emacs
> calls a window, everyone calls a pane - What everyone does with C-x
> emacs does with C-w (and woe betide if you mix that up)
> - What everyone calls head (of a list) emacs calls Car (Toyota?)
> 
> 
>> > From seeing my 20-year-olf students suffer all this
>> 
>> What do your students suffer from? The beauty of the matter is that
>> they can use any editor they like. They don't have to like or use
>> emacs.
>> 
>> (In some shops you actually virtually *have* to use Eclipse or Visual
>> Studio or the some such thing. That *is* painful.)
>> 
>> > combined with the hopelessness of convincing the emacs folks that we
>> > are in 2015, not 1980,
>> 
>> What do you need to convince emacs folks about? Emacs isn't perfect at
>> everything, but the emacs developers have kept it admirably up to date.
>> It has been following the quirks of Java, git and MS Exchange even if
>> it has been an uphill battle.
>> 
>> > I conclude this is a losing battle
>> 
>> What would you like to achieve, exactly?
> 
> Some attitude correction?
> That emacs starts its tutorial showing how to use C-p and C-n for what
> everyone uses arrows is bad enough.
> That the arrow-keys are later found to work quite alright is even worse
> and speaks of a ridiculous attitude

emacs is a great operating system - the only thing it lacks is a good 
text editor ;-)



-- 
Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you 
in.
-- Robert Frost, "The Death of the Hired Man"
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 26 Jul 2015 04:43 pm, Ian Kelly wrote:

> I'm also skeptical that this was caused by Gmail, which I've never
> seen do this and did not do this when I tried to repro it just now.
> Also, unless I'm misinterpreting the headers of the message in
> question, it appears to have been sent via Gmane, not Gmail.

The message that Laura is referring to is this:

https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2015-July/694570.html


There's no easy way to get to the headers from the list archive, but looking
at the version I downloaded via Usenet, I agree that Gmail appears to be a
red-herring.

I can't be sure how it was sent to the list, but my guess is sent to the
newsgroup comp.lang.python via Gmane, which forwards to the mailing list.
Sebastian's post claims to be sent by Gnus:

User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.5 (gnu/linux)

and although he uses a Gmail account, I see no sign that this particular
message went via Gmail.


-- 
Steven

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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Rustom Mody :

> You are being obtuse Marko!
>
> Yeah that 'M-' is what everyone calls Alt can be conveyed in a few
> seconds

Often Alt doesn't work. For example, the stupid GUI thinks it can
intercept some Alt key combinations. Then, it's good to know the ESC
prefix functions as Alt.

Also, in some settings, it is not Alt but some other funny Windows or
Mac keyboard key that serves as Meta. It's all explained at the
beginning of the builtin tutorial (C-h t).

> - What everyone calls a window, emacs calls a frame

Emacs called its windows windows long before there were windowing
systems. For example the command M-x other-window (ordinarily bound to
C-x o) would have to be renamed in a radically backward-incompatible
manner if terminology were changed.

> - And what emacs calls a window, everyone calls a pane

Uh, I believe "pane" is used by GUI programmers only. And the meaning is
not exactly the same as the emacs window.

Thing is, an emacs window is a true window in a windowing system
implemented by emacs itself. I must say, too, that it is much more
comfortable to stick to emacs windows in a single frame than working
with multiple frames.

> - What everyone does with C-x emacs does with C-w (and woe betide if you
> mix that up)

I hate typing outside emacs, where the keys mean wrong things.

> - What everyone calls head (of a list) emacs calls Car (Toyota?)

Now you're inventing things.

> That emacs starts its tutorial showing how to use C-p and C-n for what
> everyone uses arrows is bad enough.

>From said tutorial:

   Moving from screenful to screenful is useful, but how do you move to
   a specific place within the text on the screen?

   There are several ways you can do this. You can use the arrow keys,
   but it's more efficient to keep your hands in the standard position
   and use the commands C-p, C-b, C-f, and C-n. These characters are
   equivalent to the four arrow keys, like this:

  Previous line, C-p
  :
  :
  Backward, C-b  Current cursor position  Forward, C-f
  :
  :
Next line, C-n

There's nothing I would change in this explanation. I do use the arrow
keys occasionally, but I mostly use the C-p et al.

> That the arrow-keys are later found to work quite alright is even
> worse and speaks of a ridiculous attitude

Please read the tutorial passage again.


Marko
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Jul 26, 2015 at 7:51 PM, Marko Rauhamaa  wrote:
>> - What everyone calls head (of a list) emacs calls Car (Toyota?)
>
> Now you're inventing things.

No, but it's LISP rather than Emacs that calls it that. And it dates
back to an assembly language opcode. Why that got perpetuated in a
high level language, I don't know - it'd be like building a language
today and using "interrupt" as the name of its call mechanism, because
it's built on the Intel INT opcode.

ChrisA
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Chris Angelico :

> On Sun, Jul 26, 2015 at 7:51 PM, Marko Rauhamaa  wrote:
>>> - What everyone calls head (of a list) emacs calls Car (Toyota?)
>>
>> Now you're inventing things.
>
> No, but it's LISP rather than Emacs that calls it that.

You'd have to get into programming lisp before you encountered "car" in
emacs. It's much easier to grasp than "class" in Python.

Python still retains "lambda", BTW. And what are "strings", "floats",
"braces" and "sockets"? Only "bubblegum" and "ducktape" are missing
(however, "ducktype" is included).

> And it dates back to an assembly language opcode. Why that got
> perpetuated in a high level language, I don't know - it'd be like
> building a language today and using "interrupt" as the name of its
> call mechanism, because it's built on the Intel INT opcode.

It is funny, that's for sure. It comes from the time when the mechanics
of a computer inspired much more awe with the theorists than it does
nowadays.

The separation between layers of abstraction is a never-ending challenge
in our profession.

An anecdote:

Back in the late 80's I had to deal with the GSM MAP protocol. In
protocol layers, you would find MAP on top of the protocol stack as
follows (go go gadget M-x picture-mode):

+---+
| MAP   | application
+---+
| ASN.1 | presentation
+---+
| TCAP  | transaction
+---+
| SCCP  | session
+---+
| MTP3  | network
+---+
| MTP2  | link
+---+
| T1/E1 | wire
+---+

Now you express MAP data abstractly using ASN.1's abstract notation.
Phone numbers are defined (somewhat less abstractly) as hexstrings. If
the phone number is

   1234567

you express that in MAP as

   '214365F7'H

Huh?

I wondered that aloud to Nokia Network's GSM specialist. He thought
about it for a while and then said, "Well, that way the phone number
bits go out on the wire in the right order."

In telephony protocols, the least significant bit is transmitted first
on the serial wire. So, if you want the first digit (1) to go out first,
you have to place it in the lower nibble of the first octet (in the BER
encoding of ASN.1).

I was left speechless.


Marko
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Jussi Piitulainen]

Rustom Mody writes:
> On Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 2:06:00 PM UTC+5:30, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:

>> What would you like to achieve, exactly?
>
> Some attitude correction?

With all respect, take your own advice. And use an editor that works for
you.

> That emacs starts its tutorial showing how to use C-p and C-n for what
> everyone uses arrows is bad enough.

It doesn't. Those keys come three screens down the tutorial (C-h t, line
70) and are introduced as follows:

   There are several ways you can do this.  You can use the arrow keys,
   but it's more efficient to keep your hands in the standard position
   and use the commands C-p, C-b, C-f, and C-n.  These characters are
   equivalent to the four arrow keys, like this:

> That the arrow-keys are later found to work quite alright is even
> worse and speaks of a ridiculous attitude

Notice what the tutorial actually says about the arrow keys? That it
actually says something about the arrow keys, and it says it before it
introduces the mnemonic bindings?

There was a time when the arrow keys were not found to work. Quite a
while ago, but older versions of the tutorial may still be around.

An Alt is still not always available as Meta: I notice it mainly works
in my current setup, but Alt-C-(left arrow) is interpreted by my desktop
manager. Yet M-C-b works, and M-C-(left arrow) works with Esc as Meta.
It's a *system*.

But, by all means, do use an editor that works for you, and a newsreader
that works for you. I only mentioned Gnus because it's what I prefer to
use and I've had this one issue with it that turned up in a thread about
formatting code for the newsgroup. (And Emacs came up because Gnus is
implemented in Emacs.)
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Mark Lawrence]

On 26/07/2015 07:15, Rustom Mody wrote:

On Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 11:05:14 AM UTC+5:30, Chris Angelico wrote:

On Sun, Jul 26, 2015 at 3:28 PM, Rustom Mody  wrote:

JFTR: Ive been using emacs for 20+ years.  And I have the increasing feeling
that my students are getting fedup with it (and me).  Used Idle for my last 
python
course without too much grief.  If only it were an option for 25 programming 
languages, and org-mode and unicode/devanagari/tex input and.


Not sure whether you're making the point deliberately or accidentally,
but that's exactly why emacs is so big and heavy: "if only, if only".
Simpler things do less.


Do you not use ½ dozen (at least) languages?


No, I use precisely one as it fits my purposes.

--
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence

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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Mark Lawrence]

On 26/07/2015 10:21, alister wrote:


emacs is a great operating system - the only thing it lacks is a good
text editor ;-)



notepad

--
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence

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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Jussi Piitulainen]

Chris Angelico writes:

> On Sun, Jul 26, 2015 at 7:51 PM, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
>>> - What everyone calls head (of a list) emacs calls Car (Toyota?)
>>
>> Now you're inventing things.
>
> No, but it's LISP rather than Emacs that calls it that. And it dates
> back to an assembly language opcode. Why that got perpetuated in a
> high level language, I don't know - it'd be like building a language
> today and using "interrupt" as the name of its call mechanism, because
> it's built on the Intel INT opcode.

It's stuck partly *because* it's meaningless. Original LISP used
two-field cells (cons cells aka pairs) to build all structured data, and
it wouldn't have been appropriate to tie otherwise useful names for the
two fields. Should "second" mean "cdr" or should it mean "car-of-cdr"?
That depends on what data structure is being implemented by the pair.

There's also a tradition of having composites of car and cdr, up to four
deep (down to four deep?), named like cadr (meaning car of cdr), and
Lispers used to find these transparent (caar "meant" the first key in an
association list and cdar was the associated value, caadr and cdadr were
the second key and value ...). They've resisted the loss of this.

Data structure habits are more abstract now, and some conventional uses
of the concrete list structures come with aliases, notably "first" for
"car", "second" for "cadr", "rest" for "cdr" in Common Lisp.

I suppose early hackers were also incredibly tolerant of obscure names
in general.
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Jussi Piitulainen :

> I suppose early hackers were also incredibly tolerant of obscure names
> in general.

At first, there was only the machine language. Assembly languages
introduced "mnemonics" for the weaklings who couldn't remember the
opcodes by heart.

(Playing cards went through a somewhat similar transition when Americans
added numbers for those who couldn't immediately perceive the number of
dots on the card.)

To this day, assembly language programmers prefer to keep the mnemonics
short and leave the nonpreschoolers wondering what EIEIO could possibly
stand for.


Marko
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Rustom Mody]

On Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 4:13:17 PM UTC+5:30, Jussi Piitulainen wrote:
> Rustom Mody writes:
> > On Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 2:06:00 PM UTC+5:30, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
> 
> >> What would you like to achieve, exactly?
> >
> > Some attitude correction?
> 
> With all respect, take your own advice. And use an editor that works for
> you.
> 
> > That emacs starts its tutorial showing how to use C-p and C-n for what
> > everyone uses arrows is bad enough.
> 
> It doesn't. Those keys come three screens down the tutorial (C-h t, line
> 70) and are introduced as follows:
> 
>There are several ways you can do this.  You can use the arrow keys,
>but it's more efficient to keep your hands in the standard position
>and use the commands C-p, C-b, C-f, and C-n.  These characters are
>equivalent to the four arrow keys, like this:
> 
> > That the arrow-keys are later found to work quite alright is even
> > worse and speaks of a ridiculous attitude
> 
> Notice what the tutorial actually says about the arrow keys? That it
> actually says something about the arrow keys, and it says it before it
> introduces the mnemonic bindings?

Ok I was wrong on that one, sorry.
[Im not sure when the last time I looked and I didnt find it]
Doesn't change the fact that there are dozens of obsoleteisms
For the old user they are mostly irrelevant
For the new they steepen the learning curve with trivia.

Funny thing is I said much the same on the emacs list just a few weeks ago:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gnu-emacs/2015-05/msg00230.html

And nobody pointed out what you are Marko just did
[Unless I missed somethin' there as well??]
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Grant Edwards]

On 2015-07-26, Chris Angelico  wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 26, 2015 at 4:15 PM, Rustom Mody  wrote:
>> Well Almost.
>>
>> Emacs used to stand for "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping"
>> At a time when 8 MB was large. Is it today?
>> So let me ask you:
[...]
>> If you have one app to do them all, I'd like (and pay!) for it
>> If not I bet they are mutually inconsistent.
>
> For the most part, I use a single text editor. But all their
> ancillary tools are separate. Emacs tries to be absolutely
> everything, not just editing text files; that's why it's big. Size
> isn't just a matter of disk or RAM footprint, it's also (and much
> more importantly) UI complexity.
>
> It's a trade-off, of course. If you constantly have to switch programs
> to do your work, that's a different form of UI complexity.

There's always Eclipse, where you spend 30% of your time trying to get
plugins to work, 30% upgrading it, 30% trying to figure out why a
project somebody else created won't work for you, and 10% shopping for
more RAM.

-- 
Grant


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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Grant Edwards]

On 2015-07-26, Rustom Mody  wrote:

> JFTR: Ive been using emacs for 20+ years.  And I have the increasing
> feeling that my students are getting fedup with it (and me).

I don't understand.

Why do your students even _know_ (let alone care!) what editor you
use?

I admit it was years ago, but after attending three universities and
getting a BS in Computer Engineering and an MS in Computer Science and
Electrical Engieneering, I hadn't the foggiest idea what editors any
of the faculty used.  Nor would I have cared one way or the other if I
had known.

-- 
Grant
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Grant Edwards]

On 2015-07-26, Laura Creighton  wrote:
> In a message of Sun, 26 Jul 2015 00:58:08 -, Grant Edwards writes:
>
>>You use mutt or something else decent as your MUA.
>>
>
> I do -- the problem is all the gmail users out there.

So am I, and I use mutt as my MUA pretty much exclusively. [I
sometimes use the web UI when I want to do fancy searches.]

-- 
Grant



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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Rustom Mody]

On Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 9:17:16 PM UTC+5:30, Grant Edwards wrote:
> On 2015-07-26, Rustom Mody wrote:
> 
> > JFTR: Ive been using emacs for 20+ years.  And I have the increasing
> > feeling that my students are getting fedup with it (and me).
> 
> I don't understand.
> 
> Why do your students even _know_ (let alone care!) what editor you
> use?
> 
> I admit it was years ago, but after attending three universities and
> getting a BS in Computer Engineering and an MS in Computer Science and
> Electrical Engieneering, I hadn't the foggiest idea what editors any
> of the faculty used.  Nor would I have cared one way or the other if I
> had known.

Its 2015 now and any ½ decent teacher of programming, writes programs in front 
of the class. And debugs and hacks and pokes around OS-related stuff (ps, top 
and more arcane) etc. 

[Yeah I did hear complaints about an OS teacher who puts up PPTs and reads them
out. So the set < ½-decent is not empty I guess]

So while emacs makes everything else look rather puerile, setting it up
is such a bitch that last python course I just switched to idle.
Must admit it was more pleasant than I expected.
Except that sometimes we need C and C++ and assembly and haskell and make and 
config files and git commits and...
And so emacs (or eclipse!!) remains the only option
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Mark Lawrence]

On 26/07/2015 16:59, Rustom Mody wrote:


So while emacs makes everything else look rather puerile, setting it up
is such a bitch that last python course I just switched to idle.
Must admit it was more pleasant than I expected.
Except that sometimes we need C and C++ and assembly and haskell and make and
config files and git commits and...
And so emacs (or eclipse!!) remains the only option



Here's what you need 
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2949917/application-development/visual-studio-2015-expands-language-roster-mobile-support.html


Only takes around four hours 30 minutes to install and up to 8G of disk 
space.  Ideal for most people I'd have thought :)


--
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence

--
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Mon, 27 Jul 2015 01:59 am, Rustom Mody wrote:

> Its 2015 now and any ½ decent teacher of programming, writes programs in
> front of the class. 

Yeah, but the fully decent teachers prepare before hand, so the students
don't have to wait while they type out the (buggy) program in front of
them.

*half a smiley*


> And debugs and hacks and pokes around OS-related stuff 
> (ps, top and more arcane) etc.

And you do that in Emacs instead of the shell?

Or IPython?


> [Yeah I did hear complaints about an OS teacher who puts up PPTs and reads
> [them out. So the set < ½-decent is not empty I guess]

Did the students really complain "Teacher X came to class prepared with code
already written"? Or was the complaint about the technology used? Or
something else?

I really don't know how I feel about this. I did maths and physics at uni,
and it seems natural for the lecturer to work through the mathematics in
front of you. I also did computer science, and it feels completely natural
for the lecturer to hand out notes with the code already written. (These
days, I suppose, you would use slides, or give them a URL and tell them to
download the code.) Except for the most trivial interactive examples in the
Python REPR, I can't imagine why anyone would want to watch the lecturer
type the code out in front of them.

I can think of one exception... watching somebody go through the iterative
process of debugging code.


> So while emacs makes everything else look rather puerile, setting it up
> is such a bitch that last python course I just switched to idle.
> Must admit it was more pleasant than I expected.
> Except that sometimes we need C and C++ and assembly and haskell and make
> and config files and git commits and...
> And so emacs (or eclipse!!) remains the only option

Um... your students are probably using Macs, Windows, and a small minority
with Linux, yes? On laptops?

Your Linux students are probably fine. Some of them probably know more than
you :-)

Mac users have access to a full BSB environment, even if most of them don't
know it.

Your Windows users are the problem. You could try GnuWin and Gnu Core
Utilities for a set of GNU tools for Windows. You could build a bootable
USB stick containing the Linux installation of your choice, and get them to
use that. (Of course, I can imagine your school/university having a
conniption fit at the thought of the liability issues if the software
erased somebody's hard drive...)

Things were much better in my day. Nobody expected the students to have
access to a computer at home. You used a dumb workstation to log into a VAX
running Unix, and used the tools the uni supplied, or a standalone Mac 512K
(if you were lucky) or Mac 128K (if you weren't), and again, you used the
tools they supplied.



-- 
Steven

-- 
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list

Re: Gmail eats Python

[Sebastian P . Luque]

On Sat, 25 Jul 2015 18:34:30 +0200,
Laura Creighton  wrote:

> Gmail eats Python.  We just saw this mail back from Sebastian Luque
> which says in part:

 try: all_your_code_which_is_happy_with_non_scalars except
 WhateverErrorPythonGivesYouWhenYouTryThisWithScalars:
 whatever_you_want_to_do_when_this_happens

> Ow!  Gmail is understanding the >>> I stuck in as 'this is from the
> python console as a quoting marker and thinks it can reflow that.

> I think that splunqe must already have gmail set for plain text or
> else even worse mangling must show up.

> How do you teach gmail not to reflow what it thinks of as 'other
> people's quoted text'?

Apologies for all the concern the formatting of the quoted message in my
reply has generated.  I actually cannot see the multiple ">" you quote
here on my original follow-up message.  I can tell you I'm using Emacs
Gnus, and when viewing my un-processed message, that snippet looks like
this:

>> try: all_your_code_which_is_happy_with_non_scalars except
>> WhateverErrorPythonGivesYouWhenYouTryThisWithScalars:
>> whatever_you_want_to_do_when_this_happens

Sure, the reflowing is probably a feature I've set up to wrap long
lines.  I know it annoys some people (mildly myself, as I haven't found
a fix), but when reading coding fora, I never really take quoted code
snippets seriously and always check the original post for these...

-- 
Seb

-- 
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Grant Edwards]

On 2015-07-26, Rustom Mody  wrote:
> On Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 9:17:16 PM UTC+5:30, Grant Edwards wrote:
>> On 2015-07-26, Rustom Mody wrote:
>> 
>>> JFTR: Ive been using emacs for 20+ years.  And I have the increasing
>>> feeling that my students are getting fedup with it (and me).

[...]
>> Why do your students even _know_ (let alone care!) what editor you
>> use?
>> 
>> I admit it was years ago, but after attending three universities and
>> getting a BS in Computer Engineering and an MS in Computer Science and
>> Electrical Engieneering, I hadn't the foggiest idea what editors any
>> of the faculty used.  Nor would I have cared one way or the other if I
>> had known.
>
> Its 2015 now and any ½ decent teacher of programming, writes programs
> in front of the class. And debugs and hacks and pokes around
> OS-related stuff (ps, top and more arcane) etc. 

I still don't get it.

You're not teaching the _editor_, so why would it matter to anybody
which editor you're using to show them the code?  They can see the
code, and they can see what it does.  Are they too stupid to figure
out how to insert or delete a line using whatever editor they prefer?

I remember being shown live examples in a numerical programming class,
and not only was the _editor_ one I had never touched (or would), the
language and OS were ones I had never used and never would.  It didn't
detract from what was actually being _taught_ -- which was not "how to
edit and run programs on an Apple-something-or-other".

The live examples we were shown for APL not only used a differnt
editor, OS, and virtual machine that we used, it didn't even use the
same character set!

I guess I have unealisitically high expections of modern students.

... and back then all we had were zeros!


-- 
Grant

-- 
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Ian Kelly]

On Sun, Jul 26, 2015 at 12:20 AM, Cameron Simpson  wrote:
> On 25Jul2015 22:43, Ian Kelly  wrote:
>>
>> On Jul 25, 2015 4:51 PM, "Ben Finney"  wrote:
>>>
>>> Laura Creighton  writes:
>>> > So it was my fault by sending him a reply with >>> to the far left.
>>>
>>> No, it was Google Mail's failt for messing with the content of the
>>> message.
>
>
> Specificly, by manking the text without leave(*).
>
>> What Internet standard is being violated by reflowing text content in
>> the message body?
>
>
> RFC3676: http://tools.ietf.org/rfcmarkup?doc=3676
> See also: http://joeclark.org/ffaq.html

Thanks for the link. However, this only describes how reflowing is
permitted on Format=Flowed messages. Both the message in question and
the message it replied to omitted the Format parameter, which per the
linked RFC makes them Format=Fixed by default. I can't find any
standard discussing how Format=Fixed messages may or may not be
reflowed when quoted.

The > character that is commonly used as a prefix by virtually all (?)
MUAs is also a form of mangling. As far as I know, it is not an
Internet standard, just common convention (RFC 3676 specifies it, but
again only for Format=Flowed plain text). Is there some standard I'm
not aware of that permits quoting but forbids reflowing?

Note that RFC 5322 recommends a line length limit of 78 characters and
requires a limit of 998 characters, so in a sufficiently long
exchange, reflowing would eventually become necessary.
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Rustom Mody]

On Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 11:11:04 PM UTC+5:30, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Jul 2015 01:59 am, Rustom Mody wrote:
> 
> > Its 2015 now and any ½ decent teacher of programming, writes programs in
> > front of the class. 
> 
> Yeah, but the fully decent teachers prepare before hand, so the students
> don't have to wait while they type out the (buggy) program in front of
> them.
> 
> *half a smiley*
> 
> 
> > And debugs and hacks and pokes around OS-related stuff 
> > (ps, top and more arcane) etc.
> 
> And you do that in Emacs instead of the shell?
> 
> Or IPython?
> 
> 
> > [Yeah I did hear complaints about an OS teacher who puts up PPTs and reads
> > [them out. So the set < ½-decent is not empty I guess]
> 
> Did the students really complain "Teacher X came to class prepared with code
> already written"? Or was the complaint about the technology used? Or
> something else?
> 
> I really don't know how I feel about this. I did maths and physics at uni,
> and it seems natural for the lecturer to work through the mathematics in
> front of you. I also did computer science, and it feels completely natural
> for the lecturer to hand out notes with the code already written. (These
> days, I suppose, you would use slides, or give them a URL and tell them to
> download the code.) Except for the most trivial interactive examples in the
> Python REPR, I can't imagine why anyone would want to watch the lecturer
> type the code out in front of them.
> 
> I can think of one exception... watching somebody go through the iterative
> process of debugging code.
> 
> 
> > So while emacs makes everything else look rather puerile, setting it up
> > is such a bitch that last python course I just switched to idle.
> > Must admit it was more pleasant than I expected.
> > Except that sometimes we need C and C++ and assembly and haskell and make
> > and config files and git commits and...
> > And so emacs (or eclipse!!) remains the only option
> 
> Um... your students are probably using Macs, Windows, and a small minority
> with Linux, yes? On laptops?
> 
> Your Linux students are probably fine. Some of them probably know more than
> you :-)
> 
> Mac users have access to a full BSB environment, even if most of them don't
> know it.
> 
> Your Windows users are the problem.

Pretty much.
½ Linux ½ Windows, 1 mac
Tried to get everyone onto linux.
Most did. Some failed to install it.
[I actually called these stragglers for one special ubuntu-setup session.
Didn't happen for some silly reasons]
So I couldn't dictate linux, just 'suggest' it :-)
Policy-wise: College provides machines (supposedly) setup
Practically: If one relies on that, the hours the students spend with these
will end up being ¼ what they would spend on their own laptops

> You could try GnuWin and Gnu Core
> Utilities for a set of GNU tools for Windows. You could build a bootable
> USB stick containing the Linux installation of your choice, and get them to
> use that. (Of course, I can imagine your school/university having a
> conniption fit at the thought of the liability issues if the software
> erased somebody's hard drive...)
> 
> Things were much better in my day. Nobody expected the students to have
> access to a computer at home. You used a dumb workstation to log into a VAX
> running Unix, and used the tools the uni supplied, or a standalone Mac 512K
> (if you were lucky) or Mac 128K (if you weren't), and again, you used the
> tools they supplied.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Steven

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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Seb]

And for those interested in how I received Laura's message (the one I
replied to):

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And because I was rushed and posted without revision I left out something
important.

>So this is, quite likely, the pattern that you are looking for:
>
>try:
>   all_your_code_which_is_happy_with_non_scalars
>except WhateverErrorPythonGivesYouWhenYouTryThisWithScalars:
>   whatever_you_want_to_do_when_this_happens
>
>This is the usual way to do things.

I forgot to

Re: Gmail eats Python

[Rustom Mody]

On Monday, July 27, 2015 at 1:15:29 AM UTC+5:30, Grant Edwards wrote:
> On 2015-07-26, Rustom Mody  wrote:
> > On Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 9:17:16 PM UTC+5:30, Grant Edwards wrote:
> >> On 2015-07-26, Rustom Mody wrote:
> >> 
> >>> JFTR: Ive been using emacs for 20+ years.  And I have the increasing
> >>> feeling that my students are getting fedup with it (and me).
> 
> [...]
> >> Why do your students even _know_ (let alone care!) what editor you
> >> use?
> >> 
> >> I admit it was years ago, but after attending three universities and
> >> getting a BS in Computer Engineering and an MS in Computer Science and
> >> Electrical Engieneering, I hadn't the foggiest idea what editors any
> >> of the faculty used.  Nor would I have cared one way or the other if I
> >> had known.
> >
> > Its 2015 now and any ½ decent teacher of programming, writes programs
> > in front of the class. And debugs and hacks and pokes around
> > OS-related stuff (ps, top and more arcane) etc. 
> 
> I still don't get it.
> 
> You're not teaching the _editor_, so why would it matter to anybody
> which editor you're using to show them the code?  They can see the
> code, and they can see what it does.  Are they too stupid to figure
> out how to insert or delete a line using whatever editor they prefer?
> 
> I remember being shown live examples in a numerical programming class,
> and not only was the _editor_ one I had never touched (or would), the
> language and OS were ones I had never used and never would.  It didn't
> detract from what was actually being _taught_ -- which was not "how to
> edit and run programs on an Apple-something-or-other".
> 
> The live examples we were shown for APL not only used a differnt
> editor, OS, and virtual machine that we used, it didn't even use the
> same character set!
> 
> I guess I have unealisitically high expections of modern students.
> 
> ... and back then all we had were zeros!

Was setting up machines for use a job you did in your days?
I know we didn't set up any -- there were no machines to set up other than the 
privately unaffordable public resources.
Today a machine is about as personal and private as a toothbrush.

DevOps is a fashionable term these days.
We used to call it system-administration.
As expected CS education is about 10 years behind the curve in seeing its
importance
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Rick Johnson]

On Saturday, July 25, 2015 at 11:35:02 AM UTC-5, Laura Creighton wrote:
> How do you teach gmail not to reflow what it thinks of as
> 'other people's quoted text'?

My simple solution is to bulk replace ">>> " with "py> ".
Also has the benefit of differentiating between languages
when a proper "tag" is used.

py> # Python code

rb> # Ruby code

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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Jul 27, 2015 at 3:40 AM, Steven D'Aprano  wrote:
>> So while emacs makes everything else look rather puerile, setting it up
>> is such a bitch that last python course I just switched to idle.
>> Must admit it was more pleasant than I expected.
>> Except that sometimes we need C and C++ and assembly and haskell and make
>> and config files and git commits and...
>> And so emacs (or eclipse!!) remains the only option
>
> Um... your students are probably using Macs, Windows, and a small minority
> with Linux, yes? On laptops?
>
> Your Linux students are probably fine. Some of them probably know more than
> you :-)
>
> Mac users have access to a full BSB environment, even if most of them don't
> know it.
>
> Your Windows users are the problem. You could try GnuWin and Gnu Core
> Utilities for a set of GNU tools for Windows. You could build a bootable
> USB stick containing the Linux installation of your choice, and get them to
> use that. (Of course, I can imagine your school/university having a
> conniption fit at the thought of the liability issues if the software
> erased somebody's hard drive...)

There's another option, and it's what we use at Thinkful: direct all
your students to a browser-based IDE that's backed by a consistent
Linux VM. At the moment, we're recommending Cloud 9; we used to use
Nitrous, and there are plenty of other options out there. It may not
be as fast as working natively, but believe you me, it's a huge boon
to have all your students start off with something consistent! (Those
who know what they're doing are welcome to diverge from the
recommendation; I have several students who use their own desktops,
usually either Mac OS or Linux, but one uses Windows. But the same
thing still applies: playing around with the C9 IDE is the reliable
fallback for when they have trouble.)

In terms of dev environments, Linux is usually the easiest to set up -
even when you try to support umpteen distros. Partly this is because
most people who use Linux are aware of what their package manager is,
so you can say "Go and install the python-numpy package" and most of
them can figure that out (apt-get, yum, pacman, GUI front-end,
anything). Macs aren't overly difficult; as Steven says, there's
plenty of stuff available, plus it's reasonably easy to describe path
names and such in the Unix way, and have them be compatible with Linux
and Mac OS. Even the shell is almost always consistent - I've yet to
meet any student who isn't using some variant of bash. Windows, on the
other hand, is a pest to support, because so much is different. Do you
tell people to install Git Bash and work in Cygwin? Do you tell them
to grab one of the scientific Python stacks and use PowerShell? The
default shell is sufficiently weak that it needs to be replaced, but
there's no one obvious answer. So a browser-based alternative is the
way to go for us.

ChrisA
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Rustom Mody]

A bizarre current gnus sob-story brought me back to this thread:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gnu-emacs/2015-07/msg00738.html

Starts here
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gnu-emacs/2015-07/msg00591.html


On Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 4:13:17 PM UTC+5:30, Jussi Piitulainen wrote:
> Rustom Mody writes:
> > On Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 2:06:00 PM UTC+5:30, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
> 
> >> What would you like to achieve, exactly?
> >
> > Some attitude correction?
> 
> With all respect, take your own advice. And use an editor that works for
> you.

Sorry if I seemed insulting to you and/or the emacs-devs.
I meant to say attitude of *general emacs users* is ridiculous.
Try out emacs stackexchange and tell me]

Here is a classic flamewar from one 'emacs-oldbie' ranting against changes:
http://ergoemacs.org/misc/Mark_Crispin_emacs_line_wrap_rant_2011-06-03.txt

Some snippets:
-
- Why should users - who presumably have work to do - be obliged to do this?
 [find surprises in new versions]

- It sounds like Microsoft Word is more suitable for the sort of work that
you do.  Perhaps you ought to use Word instead of seeking to make emacs
become more like Word.

- It does no good whatsoever to tell me that I should get used to the
change.  Other machines don't have that change.  Some are still in emacs
18¹.  Others are bleeding edge.

- I should not have to customize emacs so that CTRL/A, CTRL/E, CTRL/N, and
CTRL/P continue to work the way they've done since the mid-1970s.

etc etc

¹ emacs 18 dates from around 1992 (!!)


The whole point of the rant being that (some old fart thinks that) emacs should 
stay the same as it was 25 years ago and is going to scream hellfire if
a single keystroke changes.

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Re: Gmail eats Python

[random832]

On Sun, Jul 26, 2015, at 02:43, Ian Kelly wrote:
> What Internet standard is being violated by reflowing text content in
> the message body?

Well, implicitly, text is only supposed to be reflowed when
format=flowed is in use, and only then when each physical line of the
file ends with a space character.

If there were _no_ internet standard on reflowing that would be one
thing (new feature whereas the standards are behind the times), but the
standard for reflowing is actually well-established (RFC 2646, dated
1999) and there's no real reason for not following it.
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[random832]

On Sun, Jul 26, 2015, at 07:48, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
> At first, there was only the machine language. Assembly languages
> introduced "mnemonics" for the weaklings who couldn't remember the
> opcodes by heart.

To be fair, x86 is also a particularly terrible example of a machine
language, from the perspective of someone imagining being expected to
memorize it. Compare it with PDP-11, which had eight registers and eight
addressing modes and a whole lot less to memorize (since each of these
appears in every instruction as a single octal digit).
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Larry Martell]

On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 10:51 AM,   wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 26, 2015, at 07:48, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
>> At first, there was only the machine language. Assembly languages
>> introduced "mnemonics" for the weaklings who couldn't remember the
>> opcodes by heart.
>
> To be fair, x86 is also a particularly terrible example of a machine
> language, from the perspective of someone imagining being expected to
> memorize it. Compare it with PDP-11, which had eight registers and eight
> addressing modes and a whole lot less to memorize (since each of these
> appears in every instruction as a single octal digit).


6809 was the best machine language.
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Tue, 28 Jul 2015 20:35:15 -0700, Rustom Mody writes:
>- I should not have to customize emacs so that CTRL/A, CTRL/E, CTRL/N, and
>CTRL/P continue to work the way they've done since the mid-1970s.
>
>etc etc
>
>¹ emacs 18 dates from around 1992 (!!)

No, the original one was written in 1976.

These control characters are the very basic move characters in emacs.
People have always been free to remap them if they want them to do
something else, but waking up in the morning and discovering that you
cannot move to the front of your current line, to the end ot it, one line
up and one line down  because somebody has changed this ***for everybody***
would get me quite upset, too.

Laura (happy emacs user since 1979)
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Ian Kelly]

On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 6:42 AM,   wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 26, 2015, at 02:43, Ian Kelly wrote:
>> What Internet standard is being violated by reflowing text content in
>> the message body?
>
> Well, implicitly, text is only supposed to be reflowed when
> format=flowed is in use, and only then when each physical line of the
> file ends with a space character.

An implicit requirement is not a standard. The whole point of having a
standard is to make the requirements formal and explicit.
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Cameron Simpson]

On 29Jul2015 10:51, random...@fastmail.us  wrote:

On Sun, Jul 26, 2015, at 07:48, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:

At first, there was only the machine language. Assembly languages
introduced "mnemonics" for the weaklings who couldn't remember the
opcodes by heart.


To be fair, x86 is also a particularly terrible example of a machine
language, from the perspective of someone imagining being expected to
memorize it. Compare it with PDP-11, which had eight registers and eight
addressing modes and a whole lot less to memorize (since each of these
appears in every instruction as a single octal digit).


16 registers - you forget the alternate register set.

Since the UNIX V7 kernel code never made use of them we used to use them as a 
crude messaging system from user space, as what you put there sayed there, 
globally accessible by other users.


Cheers,
Cameron Simpson 

TeX: When you pronounce it correctly to your computer, the terminal may
become slightly moist. - D. E. Knuth.
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Cameron Simpson]

On 29Jul2015 18:32, Laura Creighton  wrote:

In a message of Tue, 28 Jul 2015 20:35:15 -0700, Rustom Mody writes:

- I should not have to customize emacs so that CTRL/A, CTRL/E, CTRL/N, and
CTRL/P continue to work the way they've done since the mid-1970s.

etc etc

¹ emacs 18 dates from around 1992 (!!)


No, the original one was written in 1976.

These control characters are the very basic move characters in emacs.
People have always been free to remap them if they want them to do
something else, but waking up in the morning and discovering that you
cannot move to the front of your current line, to the end ot it, one line
up and one line down  because somebody has changed this ***for everybody***
would get me quite upset, too.


Yeah, I'd be annoyed too. I'm a vi user, but use the emacs mode for shell 
command line editing as it is modeless. ^A, ^E, ^P and ^N are really quite 
critical.



Laura (happy emacs user since 1979)


Cheers,
Cameron Simpson  (happy vi user since 1985)

English is a living language, but simple illiteracy is no basis for
linguistic evolution.   - Dwight MacDonald
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Re: Gmail eats Python

[Rustom Mody]

On Thursday, July 30, 2015 at 6:15:56 AM UTC+5:30, Cameron Simpson wrote:
> On 29Jul2015 18:32, Laura Creighton  wrote:
> >These control characters are the very basic move characters in emacs.
> >People have always been free to remap them if they want them to do
> >something else, but waking up in the morning and discovering that you
> >cannot move to the front of your current line, to the end ot it, one line
> >up and one line down  because somebody has changed this ***for everybody***
> >would get me quite upset, too.
> 
> Yeah, I'd be annoyed too. I'm a vi user, but use the emacs mode for shell 
> command line editing as it is modeless. ^A, ^E, ^P and ^N are really quite 
> critical.
> 
> >Laura (happy emacs user since 1979)
> 
> Cheers,
> Cameron Simpson (happy vi user since 1985)
> 
> English is a living language, but simple illiteracy is no basis for
> linguistic evolution.   - Dwight MacDonald

That footer says it best:
Some stability is expected, also some change.
Finding a sweetspot midway is hard and very necessary

BTW I think python does a better job -- 2→3 transition than most other
long-lived projects.
Emacs is too much on the conservative side.
Haskell is too  much on the 'progress-is-heaven' side.
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