PEP-308 and the PSU

laotseu bdesth at removethis.free.fr
Fri Feb 14 00:37:50 EST 2003


Martijn Faassen wrote:
> 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.
> 

Just plain great.





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