[Python-ideas] Infix functions

[Paul Moore]

(I did read to the end, and I don't really disagree with your points,
even as a Windows programmer :-))

tl; dr - I agree with you but unfortunately Windows isn't dead yet and
practicality means we can't ignore it.

On 24 February 2014 00:45, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
> So your point comes down to "the Windows console sucks and I don't
> like Emacs".  OK, that's a valid concern -- there are an awful lot of
> developers for whom the Windows console is an essential component of
> their environments, and Emacs is more than an acquired taste, it's a
> different way of seeing the world.

Essentially, yes :-) Although there's a bit more to it:

* The C language (and hence all programmers') assumption that the
basic abstraction for calling a progcess uses argc/atgv. That's not
true on some operating systems (Windows, yeah, but "all the world is
Unix" is a bad assumption even when the alternative is not Windows)
and the C runtime has to jump through hoops (sometimes not perfectly)
to pretend that lie is true. (That's the grep issue).

I'll take your word re Emacs, as I use Vim. Vim is certainly as
capable of Emacs of dealing with Unicode, but it doesn't do so out of
the box (it's what happens if you *don't* think hard about Unicode
that's relevant to this thread). Probably the most likely thing for
people to forget is using the right encoding for Python files (for
extra credit, make that UTF8 on Py3, but ASCII on Py2!), even though
that differs from the system default.

> But how many more decades is the Windows console going to be allowed
> to hold back the rest of the world?  If it hasn't learned Unicode by
> now, is there any reason to suppose it ever will?  If it won't learn,
> why not bite the bullet now?  There are fewer Windows programmers to
> feel pain now than there ever will be again (we hope :-)!

I wish I knew. I would kill for a proper Unicode-conforming console.
But my company provides me with a Windows PC ro use at work, and the
games I like to play are Windows-only. So for work and play, Windows
is my environment, for better or worse. Maybe Windows 8 is so bad that
the climate will shift. Maybe macs will stop costing more than my
house at some point. But it's still some way off (and that was the
original point - not that Unicode is desirable, but that we've reached
the point where using it is not an issue). I would love to switch from
Windows, but if I did so for my hobby coding, it'd lose any relevance
it has to the rest of my life...

Anyhow, we're way off topic here, so I'll stop.

Paul