PEP-308 and the PSU

[Martijn Faassen]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE TO PSU MEMBERS ONLY -- UNALLOWED RESTRIBUTION
WILL RESULT IN COMPLETE ELIMINATION IN ANY TIMESTREAM

It has puzzled a number of Python Secret Underground members enough to
write questioning emails to PSU High Command that the debate about
PEP-308 still continues, even after everything that could've been
possibly said about it has been said five times, and even misapprehensions
have been repeated repeatedly. Why is this terminally boring debate still
dominating comp.lang.python, they ask? Why not debate more important stuff,
like the need for single precision float support with arrogant C++ 
programmers?

The answer should be clear to those who followed the GNU debates -- 
debating ternary operator support extends the lifetime of the
universe. This goal is desirable to almost all participants of the universe,
including the PSU but excluding the Re-engineered Glomerates of Star
Cluster 63. 

A recent trip into the future, in particular to the Grey Era of Uncertainty
just after the collapse of the first Dawn Federation, resulted through
classified-need-to-know-basis events in the realization that debating ternary 
operator issues is more effective in extending the lifetime of the 
universe than GNU-wars by an order of magnitude. Glad that sentence is
over, too.

Since then, the PSU has tried to fire up ternary operator debates everywhere.
Unknown to most of the world, a proposal to remove the ternary operator
from the C# language has occupied half of Microsoft for the last 5
months already. This success has astounded even the PSU (and we have access
to a time machine!) -- the total lifetime of the universe has been extended
by 5.7 billion years at least thanks to Microsoft. And that was before
the debate spread *spontaneously without any interference by the PSU* 
from Microsoft to Sun, where the Javasoft engineers have been so embroiled
in this debate the last two months that they completely neglected making
Java actually work properly on the Solaris platform. And three weeks ago
this spread to IBM, though granted the PSU helped things a bit there.

If major software companies can be locked up in this debate so successfully,
the PSU reasoned, let alone the open source world, the global nexus of
endless nitpicking over details no outsider could care less out. And thus
we attempted to influence matters close to home, in the Python world. 
Through the timbot, we influenced Guido van Rossum to post his proposals
to comp.lang.python. The PSU already had high expectations, but then we
were stunned again beyond our wildest dreams when Guido *all by himself*
added an utterly brilliant innovation to the mix that even the best PSU
bot-cluster could not have improved:

> Please understand that I don't have a lot of time
> to moderate the discussion; I'll just wait for the community to
> discuss the proposal and agree on some way to count votes, then count
> them.

The most recent estimates by astronomers is that the age of the universe
is essentially unbounded.