Path: csiph.com!v102.xanadu-bbs.net!xanadu-bbs.net!news.glorb.com!news-out.readnews.com!transit3.readnews.com!panix!roy From: Roy Smith Newsgroups: comp.lang.python Subject: Re: the meaning of rﾕ.......ï¾ Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2012 08:55:22 -0400 Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and UNIX, NYC Lines: 22 Message-ID: References: <500d0632$0$1504$c3e8da3$76491128@news.astraweb.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost X-Trace: reader1.panix.com 1343048123 14304 127.0.0.1 (23 Jul 2012 12:55:23 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@panix.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2012 12:55:23 +0000 (UTC) User-Agent: MT-NewsWatcher/3.5.3b3 (Intel Mac OS X) Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.python:25857 In article <500d0632$0$1504$c3e8da3$76491128@news.astraweb.com>, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > Technically, no, it's a SyntaxError, because the Original Poster has used > some sort of "Smart Quotes" characters r’‘ instead of good old fashioned > typewriter-style quotes r'' or r"". > > If you're going to ask programming questions using an email client that > changes what you type, including smart quotes, special hyphens or other > characters, you're going to have a bad time. Some day, we're going to have programming languages that take advantage of the full unicode character set. Right now, we're working in ASCII and creating silly digrams/trigrams like r'' for raw strings (and triple-quotes for multi-line strings). Not to mention <=, >=, ==, !=. And in languages other than python, things like ->, => (arrows for structure membership), and so on. When I first started writing C code, it was on ASR-33s which did not support curly baces. We wrote ¥( for { and ¥) for } (although I think the translation was handled entirely in the TTY driver and the compiler was never in on the joke). 20 or 30 years from now, people are going to look back on us neanderthals and laugh about how we had to write r''.