Totally Confused: Passing variables to functions

[Steven Taschuk]

Quoth Asun Friere:
  [...]
> read news on Google Groups and (I confess without having looked into
> it) it appears that the '>>>' fools the renderer into thinking this a
> quoted comment which seems to strip our the following newline.  Eg.
> when someone writes:
> >>>foo
> None
> It is displayed as:
> >>>foo None
> which can be a little bit annoying to read.  Nothing more than that.

Ah.  I hadn't noticed that Google does any text changes at all
(modulo the quoting of HTML-special characters).  It looks to me
like they just throw the whole verbatim text in a <pre> block.
(Exactly the Right Thing, naturally.  Also quite unlike and much
better than Deja was.)

*I'd* thought, also without having looked into it, that this kind
of mangling occurred when quoted text passed through specific (or
specific configurations of) news- or mailreaders.  It does, as you
allude, make sense if one's software misinterprets
    >>> fjkdlj
    fjkdls
sa a quoted line which got split by an overzealous line-wrapping
algorithm, and tries to fix it.

Hm... we'll have to keep an eye out for it and investigate further.

-- 
Steven Taschuk                            staschuk at telusplanet.net
"Our analysis begins with two outrageous benchmarks."
  -- "Implementation strategies for continuations", Clinger et al.