Behavior of the for-else construct

[Avi Gross]

>>>
Pascal versus PASCAL versus pascal (not versus paschal) and
Perl versus PERL versus perl (not versus pearl)

seems to be a topic.
<<<

The nitpickers here are irrelevant. I happen to know how things are formally spelled and if I was publishing a book, might carefully proofread it.

I sometimes use upper case for Emphasis and do not give a dAMN. But feel free to correct my spelling in case you suspect someone here truly misunderstood a message because it was written with the wrong case.

I do learn, but when it is something I already know and am not particularly interested in proofreading, the result tends to be that I simply get annoyed and the one pointing it out is taken as wandering off topic even more than I do.

Python is named after a snake right? So is it upper case or lower case or mixed case? No, wait, it is named after Monty Python. But what made them choose that name and why would anyone then name a programming language after them? I can see some rudimentary reasoning in naming Ada and maybe for Pascal, albeit I can think of many others who deserve it as much or more that nobody has chosen to honor. Did Turing catch on, I mean as a programming language rather than a machine? 

I don't care if someone says PYTHON or Python or python when informally discussing things. They all mean the same thing to me. On the other hand, names like "R" and "S" and "C" are rarely presented as lower-case while I sometimes see c++ or c# for some reason. Obviously the right version is upper case, albeit the plus sign and sharp sign have no upper case version.

FORTRAN supposedly stands for FORmula TRANslator or something. So why does it have to be all uppercase? Was COBOL named for COmmon Business Oriented Language. Should it be CoBOL?

I have lots of awareness that Perl is generally written in mixed case, except when it isn't. I have seen people justify the name by saying it was short for Practical Extraction and Report Language but also for 	Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister! If I felt it was important, I would write it whatever way is formally required. 

What I think often happens, from a human psychology perspective, is we see Perl in middle of a sentence as a spelling mistake while PERL is obviously something like an acronym. Pascal may be named for a French person I admire but may still look like a nonsense word to those who do not know or care. Not a great excuse, of course.

But if this was being graded in these ways, and I see lots of such nitpicking in other ways when an example focusing on something does not carefully do lots of other things, I probably would focus on the many other things I don't get around to doing in my life because I waste the time here. As a voluntary effort, I can opt out.

The argument that a programming language is named after a person and thus must be spelled some way is not impressing me. Yes, to be strictly correct, it has a proper spelling. But following that reasoning, why does anyone give an email address of john.smith at gmail.com or JANEDOE at yahoo.com instead of ...?



-----Original Message-----
From: Peter J. Holzer <hjp-python at hjp.at>
To: python-list at python.org
Sent: Sun, Mar 6, 2022 12:48 pm
Subject: Re: Behavior of the for-else construct

On 2022-03-06 09:29:19 -0800, Grant Edwards wrote:

> On 2022-03-05, Avi Gross via Python-list <python-list at python.org> wrote:
> > I am not sure how we end up conversing about PASCAL on a Python
> > forum.
> > [...]
> > I paid no attention to where PASCAL was being used other than I did
> > much of my grad school work in PASCAL [...]
> 
> It's "Pascal". It's not an acronym. It's a guy's name:
> 
>     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal


And similarly, it's "Perl", not "PERL" (also misspelled in this thread).

        hp

-- 
   _  | Peter J. Holzer    | Story must make more sense than reality.
|_|_) |                    |
| |   | hjp at hjp.at         |    -- Charles Stross, "Creative writing
__/   | http://www.hjp.at/ |       challenge!"


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