Beginner needs advice

[Rhodri James]

On Tue, 31 May 2011 01:32:01 +0100, harrismh777 <harrismh777 at charter.net>  
wrote:

> Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>> Compatibility is inherently continuous, a matter
>> of degree.
>
>     Compatible by degrees is incompatible. Just 'how' incompatible  
> determines whether the factor(s) are utterly useless, or just difficult  
> to negotiate.
>
> (uh, oh,... me suspects another analogy fallacy coming up... )
>
>> This is especially true when it comes to languages, both natural and
>> programming.
>
>      ( Yup...  analogy fallacy for Ænglisc speakers... )

I don't know about you, but I speak English not "Anglish".  This is how an  
aesc is pronounced, after all.

>> British English and American English are perhaps 99.5%
>> compatible, but "table a motion" means completely opposite things in
>> British and American English. (In Britain, it means to deal with it
>> immediately; in the USA, it means to postpone it.) Should we conclude
>> from this that British and American English are "different languages"  
>> and
>> "completely incompatible"?
>
>     We Americans have not spoken 'English' in well over two hundred  
> years...   :)          roflol

Quite the contrary, in fact.  Much American usage of English actually  
better preserves the styles of eighteenth century English usage, having  
managed to avoid some of the "corrections" of Victorian grammarians.

>     However, I guarantee that if I'm dumped unaided in Piccadilly I'll  
> be able to hail a cab, pay my £12.00 and get myself to Liverpool Street  
> Station, find the bathroom, and be on the correct train just in time for  
> dinner, all without looking into the English dictionary.

And I guarantee that you'd get odd looks for at least one of those.  You  
may not notice; we Brits are used to translating the large amount of US TV  
we get back into British English.

>     On the other hand (playing along with this analogy fallacy) if I  
> dump a python newbie unaided in the middle of 2.5 and ask them to format  
> a simple polytonic Greek unicode string and output it with print to  
> stdout (redirected to a file) they will fail... maybe even if they have  
> a dictionary !

Now this is an analogy fallacy, and an obvious one at that.

-- 
Rhodri James *-* Wildebeest Herder to the Masses