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Cerberus
Cerberus
9:00 PM
Eww.
You perv.
 
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
@tchrist Some of the things Rob says in that video are unarguably true. But the question is academic. Programming languages are way more than just their core syntax. They are an ecosystem.
Java is the computer industry's Hanzi
 
Mitch
Mitch
@Cerberus you projector of your own interior monologue!
 
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
It's annoying to use and has lots of flaws but everyone speaks it
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
@Mitch Mayhaps!
 
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
And lots of tools support it
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
9:01 PM
Hanzi is Chinese language thingy?
 
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
@Cerberus chinese characters
i.e. there are lots of systems that might be "better" by several metrics, some more objective than others. But the economic cost of "just fixing it" as Tom wants is very very high.
 
Mitch
Mitch
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 he keeps saying he's facetious he's just redoing the typed vs untyped/compiled vs interpreted argument.
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 use pinyin. -all- the westerners say so.
 
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
I mean, Google invented Go, but when it came time to build a new mobile OS, they used Java as their language, because it works and people are comfortable in it.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Right...what would make this economic cost so high? Replacing systems/routines all over the world?
 
Mitch
Mitch
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 wow, really?
 
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
9:03 PM
@Mitch And as a westerner I agree. But the Chinese don't. And anyway switching everything would be hard.
@Cerberus You have to rewrite code, get new third-party libraries, replace your virtual machines with different ones, retrain your people, etc, etc.
 
Mitch
Mitch
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 they have bopomofo, but westerners still say pin yn. All i'm saying is that everybody is biased so it's hard to judge.
 
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
@Mitch Well, the Taiwanese have that.
 
Carlo_R.
Carlo_R.
@Cerberus I know that John Lawler might kill me for asking a question like this. But, as I know you are a competent person, what do you really think on the fact that English language has its spelling different from its pronunciation? Can we imagine that in the future the spelling will tend toward the pronunciation or vice versa?
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Yeah, OK.
 
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
@Mitch bopomofo would probably work almost as well as pinyin, with the exception that you can type pinyin on a normal keyboard and not so much bpmf
 
MετάEd
MετάEd
9:05 PM
@Cerberus The Input command would take 1,900 arguments in that case. And there would need to be some way to know how many backspaces to use: 1, 2, 3, or 4.
 
Mitch
Mitch
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I'm looking for the link but can't find it.
 
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
Even if all you needed to do was replace your compiler, which would output Java class files for your JVM, you still need to retrain your staff and deal with inevitable bugs and impedance mismatches between your old code and your new code.
If there are no impedance mismatches then your new language isn't different enough to be worth switching to. If it's worth switching then switching is too hard to make it worth switching.
 
MετάEd
MετάEd
@Cerberus I am thinking I'll have to design a massive If tree.
 
Mitch
Mitch
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 but you -could- easily except it just hasn't been adopted. (if all you cared about was cultural integrity)
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
@Carlo_R. Well, all languages have differences between spelling and pronunciation. This is mainly caused by the fact that pronunciation changes faster than spelling, often much faster, as in English. Italian has relatively little difference between the two, but even there there are irregularities, I believe. Most languages are something in between English and Italian.
 
MετάEd
MετάEd
9:07 PM
Doable.
 
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
17 mins ago, by Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
Anyway, I'm outta here. @cerb: you could read this for some background on character encodings.
 
tchrist
tchrist
@Carlo_R. What do you think about Chinese spelling being so different from its pronunciation?
@Carlo_R. What do you think about French spelling being so different from its pronunciation?
@Carlo_R. What do you think about Dutch spelling being so different from its pronunciation?
@Carlo_R. What do you think about Portuguese spelling being so different from its pronunciation?
 
Robusto
Robusto
Don't forget Russian.
 
David Wallace
David Wallace
@tchrist Is lossless round tripping when they don't steal your drugs?
 
Robusto
Robusto
He's tripping, don't bother him.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
9:09 PM
@Carlo_R. As to future developments: usually spelling changes slowly to match pronunciation to some degree, or sometimes much faster when there are official spelling reforms. New technology may also make future changes a bit faster. But spelling will always be a few steps behind.
@Carlo_R. And that's not so bad, because keeping the same spelling for a long while makes it easier for us to remember and recognise written words. Written text, the shapes or words, are in a way a useful tool for us, independent of pronunciation.
 
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
@Mitch BPMF and pinyin solve the same goals: transcribing the standard pronunciation of words in Mandarin. The difference is, essentially, the font: one is Chinese strokes that look like they fit with existing characters, and one is the standard alphabet with accents for tones.
 
tchrist
tchrist
People whose first languages have a largely 1:1 correspondence with their graphical representations often seem to have a gaping lacuna in their understanding when encountering those that do not.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
@MετάEd Arguments? Those 1900 would simply be one (very long) parameter.
 
MετάEd
MετάEd
@Cerberus The difference between a parameter and an argument escapes me.
 
tchrist
tchrist
Don’t trip, you might fall.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
9:10 PM
@MετάEd The number of backspaces, yes, you could either 1.) make Input invisible, or 2.) read the number of backspaces from the length of the Outputvar in characters.
 
tchrist
tchrist
@MετάEd I can help out with the argument. :)
 
MετάEd
MετάEd
@tchrist Good point.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
@MετάEd My Stringreplace would work as a massive tree, except very simple-looking. Each "If Errorlevel" branches it.
 
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
@Mitch the Chinese make the argument that text is illegible when written in pinyin or bpmf, because a skilled Chinese reader can read a Hanzi out of context and infer lots of meaning from it, and in context there is often less ambiguity than in spoken text, and more opportunity for abbreviating without loss of meaning. However, that argument is clearly fallacious, since they understand each other just fine when talking. And other languages, like Korean, have made the switch to phonetic writing.
 
tchrist
tchrist
Uh oh, Cerb is going all techo on us.
 
MετάEd
MετάEd
9:12 PM
Techo?
Techno?
 
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
Anyway I must be off.
 
David Wallace
David Wallace
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Not quite. But I guess tchrist explained already why this is only 99% true? I stopped reading after a while.
 
MετάEd
MετάEd
Derecho?
Echo?
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I must be off too. I am starting to smell funny.
 
tchrist
tchrist
@DavidWallace Too tired to read FAQs to people.
 
MετάEd
MετάEd
I probably should have kept me in the fridge.
 
tchrist
tchrist
9:12 PM
Techno.
Progressive trance, probably.
 
MετάEd
MετάEd
@tchrist Does that mean you never snap out of it?
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
@MετάEd I didn't know what you meant by an argument, the term is not used. But all "strings(?") in the Matchlist are a single parameter together. You need 1900 strings separated by commas, but they are together just one big parameter.
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Bai!
@MετάEd If you give me a list of your input and output strings, I can write the script for you, or attempt to do so.
 
Mitch
Mitch
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 does bpmf include tone markings? also, is there a PRC/ROC difference in usae?
 
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
@Mitch I am not sure about bpmf and tones. I assume it does. It is from Taiwan, mainland china doesn't use it, they only use pinyin.
 
Carlo_R.
Carlo_R.
@Cerberus thank you for your explanation, I find that interesting and equilibrated.
 
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
9:16 PM
> Consisting of 37 characters and four tone marks, it transcribes all possible sounds in Mandarin.
That's Zhuyin (bpmf), according to wikipedia
 
Carlo_R.
Carlo_R.
@tchrist yes, but I cannot.
 
Mitch
Mitch
@tchrist That's a reasonable problem to have; one would expect what is written to be what is meant, semantically and here phonetically. Who would design a language to have such crazy rules (it always feels like things -should- have been designed even though such things usually aren't.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
@Carlo_R. Haha cool! What would Lawler find so objectionable about your question?
 
David Wallace
David Wallace
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Well in that case, here's the short version. In UTF-16, all the characters you're ever likely to use require 2 bytes, and some of the really weird ones require 4 bytes. Java expects every character to be 2 bytes, so whenever it finds a weird one, it thinks it's looking at 2 characters. This is often OK, but it can cause some unexpected weirdness. It's debatable whether it's quite as bad as Tom makes it out to be.
 
Carlo_R.
Carlo_R.
@Cerberus John Lawler do not know the written English as language.
3
 
tchrist
tchrist
9:18 PM
@Mitch That doesn’t work for a language where different speakers have different phoneme sets.
 
Carlo_R.
Carlo_R.
John thinks that that the language is only spoken.
 
Mitch
Mitch
@Carlo_R. I have a feeling he does.
 
tchrist
tchrist
If everyone spelt English in [narrow IPA], no one would understand each other’s writings.
It would be hopeless.
 
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
@DavidWallace Ah yes, the old "char" vs "code point" question.
A Good Java programmer is supposed to change all their code to use "code points".
 
Carlo_R.
Carlo_R.
@Mitch but I read a comment of him where he did say that the language is only spoken.
 
tchrist
tchrist
9:21 PM
@Carlo_R. English has dozens, scores, hundreds of different pronunciations. Pick one and write it down, and only those one of supermany who have exactly the same phoneme set will understand it. Do you understand that?
 
Mitch
Mitch
@tchrist but one usually reads only one language at a time. anyway I'm not sure exactly what the point is. I'm just saying that, yes, I agree with your remark that someone who grew up with a regular orthographic system might have great difficulty when trying to learn a written language with a terribly irregular system.
 
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
But now I really GTG. bye!
 
cornbread ninja
cornbread ninja
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 layters
 
Carlo_R.
Carlo_R.
@Mr.Shin Thank you. I did not know on that korean phenomenon
 
Mitch
Mitch
@Carlo_R. I think that is taking statements that he has said way out of context.
 
David Wallace
David Wallace
9:22 PM
@MετάEd A parameter is a variable. An argument is its value.
 
Carlo_R.
Carlo_R.
@Mr.Shin Thank you. I did not know on that korean phenomenon
 
Mitch
Mitch
@tchrist You could say something similar about Italian. You -read- the standard, but speak your local accent/dialect.
For italian the accents probably have pretty regular translations to phonetics.
For English, not so much.
 
Carlo_R.
Carlo_R.
@tchrist no, sorry, I cannot
 
tchrist
tchrist
@Carlo_R. David pronounces a great many English words “wrong” to my ear, and doubtless mine to his. If you choose either of our systems to inscribe your golden tablets in, you will piss the other off something terrible. Why would you want to do that?
As it is, we each apply our own local rules to the generic spelling, and so arrive at something that works for us but sounds nothing like each other.
 
David Wallace
David Wallace
I write a great many English words "wrong" to Tom's eye, and he to mine. If you choose either of your systems to write with ...., oh, go fill in the blanks.
 
Mitch
Mitch
9:25 PM
@tchrist I don't think that's what Carlo is wondering about. Just take any one version of English. None have phonetics corresponding to the orthography.
 
tchrist
tchrist
No David, you know that is not it.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
@Carlo_R. Haha, yeah, that is kind of true. Anglo-Saxon traditional linguistics can be a bit dogmatic.
 
tchrist
tchrist
@Mitch Middle English does.
 
Mitch
Mitch
OK.
 
David Wallace
David Wallace
@tchrist YOu can't possibly believe that wholeheartedly.
 
Carlo_R.
Carlo_R.
9:26 PM
@tchrist yes I know that David pronunces "wrong" words; but I think that people would like to hear words as they are written.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
By "traditional" I mean that which emerged in the seventies or thereabouts.
 
Carlo_R.
Carlo_R.
@tchrist for example, do you know why korean swiched their language?
 
Mitch
Mitch
@tchrist Actually, that is the best (start of an) answer to @Carlo_R. At one point orthography matched pronunciation. ... pronunciation moved on but orthography stayed the same. There, that's why.
@Carlo_R. Yes, it would be better for all, but English writing and education are so set on the current spelling that if one day we all switched our English spelling to a one-to-one mapping, nobody would be able to read.
 
tchrist
tchrist
@Carlo_R. I’m afraid that doesn’t work. English simply isn’t that way. You will never get the hundreds of different accents to throw away their own pronunciations. Ever.
@DavidWallace Of course not.
 
Mitch
Mitch
@tchrist OK, I get it, and there's that.
 
MετάEd
MετάEd
9:29 PM
@Cerberus Oh, I think it will be much easier if I just generate that automatically.
 
tchrist
tchrist
@Mitch WHOSE one-to-one spelling? There Can Be Only One!
 
MετάEd
MετάEd
@Cerberus If I had two or three of them to start, as an example, I could follow the example.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
@MετάEd If you give me three pairs, I see whether I can make it work.
 
MετάEd
MετάEd
@DavidWallace I think not the way Cerberus means it. I tried to use argument to mean value, and he said that term is not used and the correct term is parameter.
 
David Wallace
David Wallace
@MετάEd Then @Cerberus was wrong.
 
tchrist
tchrist
9:32 PM
@Carlo_R. Each word in these ~100 lexical sets has around 50 different pronunciations, which are carefully spelt out for you in IPA. Which spelling will you choose, and how will you force that on the rest of the world? To what purpose?
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
@Carlo_R. Each English dialect/accent could have its own spelling in IPA. There would be some advantages, but also many disadvantages.
 
tchrist
tchrist
It just isn’t going to work.
You would kill English as a world language.
 
David Wallace
David Wallace
This reminds me of Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian.
The same word is spelled "lep", "lip" or "lijep" depending on who's saying it.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
@MετάEd I AHK, a command takes parameters; the command here is "Input". A variable has a value.
 
MετάEd
MετάEd
@Cerberus '6 {U+2018} , '9 {U+2019} , "6 {U+201c}
How about those?
 
tchrist
tchrist
9:33 PM
Commands take arguments.
There is no difference between argument and parameter. None. Nada. Zilch.
 
David Wallace
David Wallace
My commands allow no arguments.
 
tchrist
tchrist
You mean brook.
 
David Wallace
David Wallace
@tchrist Let's talk about how the words are used.
The parameter is the variable. The argument is its value. All the programmers that I work with every day use these two words this way.
 
tchrist
tchrist
There is nothing to be said.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
@MετάEd Let me try. (By the way, I think it may be easier for you if you just use the characters themselves, not their Unicodes, unless that's all that you have).
 
David Wallace
David Wallace
9:34 PM
It may be different in your part of the world.
 
tchrist
tchrist
Apart from their interchangeability.
 
MετάEd
MετάEd
My commands slough no arguments.
 
tchrist
tchrist
Nope.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
@tchrist This is AHK speak.
 
Carlo_R.
Carlo_R.
Thank you to all for yours interesting comments. I find them very instructive.
 
tchrist
tchrist
9:34 PM
Never heard of that in my life.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
@DavidWallace Haha.
 
David Wallace
David Wallace
@tchrist Then it probably IS different in your part of the world.
 
tchrist
tchrist
I have never heard a programmer assign a different meaning to the word argument as they do to parameter.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
@Carlo_R. How would you feel if someone told you you had to learn a completely different spelling now?
 
Mitch
Mitch
@tchrist That's easy... use tengwar which, against all rationality, is not in Unicode.
 
MετάEd
MετάEd
9:35 PM
@Cerberus In some cases I suppose I will need to use the U+ form and in others not, depending on what AHK does to the input.
 
tchrist
tchrist
@Mitch It has an assigned block, and we know what is in there and where. It’ll get there.
 
Carlo_R.
Carlo_R.
@Cerberus it would be terrible.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
@Carlo_R. And how would you feel if you could barely understand a text written by your grandfather? Or by someone from a different city? Those are some reasons not to change spelling too much / too often.
 
Mitch
Mitch
@tchrist Oh sorry, you meant something else. Then by fiat, mine is the correct pronunciation for whatever orthography rules are chosen. Everybody should be happy with that because it's me.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
@Carlo_R. In Arabic, for example, A Moroccan and an Iraqui can't understand each other in speech, but they can (supposedly) read each other's newspapers.
That is an advantage of having spelling not follow pronunciation very closely.
@Carlo_R. Yeah, agreed.
 
Mitch
Mitch
9:37 PM
@tchrist His command stream no arguments.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
@MετάEd You think so? AHK should support all characters?
Can you give me a hard one?
 
Mitch
Mitch
@MετάEd I read that as 'sluff' but is it really 'slow'?
 
tchrist
tchrist
@Mitch I think you overestimate the fatness of David’s pipe.
 
David Wallace
David Wallace
@Cerberus No flirting in chat!
 
tchrist
tchrist
’Tis but a trickle, to be sure.
 
Carlo_R.
Carlo_R.
9:38 PM
@Cerberus It is more clear now for me, and I undarstodd that this switch is not possible for serious reasons.
 
tchrist
tchrist
Oops, missed the no-flirting part. Sorry for the transgression.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
@DavidWallace You're so strict.
 
Mitch
Mitch
@tchrist YES! what about Klingon?
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
@Carlo_R. Yeah, well, small switches are possible, and they do occur. But...it's difficult, and it usually takes time.
 
David Wallace
David Wallace
@Cerberus Why would you want a language that can't support all characters? (Leaving the whole Java / UTF-16 issue aside for a moment)
 
tchrist
tchrist
9:40 PM
We can do Tengwar already. 
sub Is_Tengwar_Duodecimal {
    return sprintf "%04X\t%04X\n",
        ord "\N{TENGWAR DIGIT ZERO}",
      ##ord "\N{TENGWAR DUODECIMAL DIGIT TWELVE}";   ## what a strange idea
        ord "\N{TENGWAR DUODECIMAL DIGIT ELEVEN}";
}
 
Mitch
Mitch
@Cerberus actually, Germany switched pretty rapidly from fraktur to 'normal' fonts. It's not the same thing as spelling but is pretty close.
 
tchrist
tchrist
our $TENGWAR_GRAPHEME = qr{
    (?:
        (?= \p{In_Tengwar} ) \P{In_Tengwar_Marks}
        \p{In_Tengwar_Marks} *
    ) |
        \p{In_Tengwar_Marks}
}x;
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
@DavidWallace Ehh AHK should support all characters.
 
David Wallace
David Wallace
Yes.
And on that happy note, I am going to work. See you all later.
 
Carlo_R.
Carlo_R.
@David is it possible to see the theatre of Sidney from NZ meridional coast.
 
Mitch
Mitch
9:42 PM
@Cerberus but re @tchrist, there's no necessity that any those different version do -not- have an irregular mapping. They could all have regular mappings from their very different pronunciations to the regular orthography (I think I have one more 'regular' than is necessary)
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
@Mitch Well, it is a switch, but don't forget that everyone could probably read and mostly write in Antiqua already too.
@DavidWallace Bye!
 
Carlo_R.
Carlo_R.
@David NOOOOO, you cannot leave me now! After my question.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
@Mitch Um I'm not sure what you mean.
Is this about Unicode or spelling?
Hehe, okay, I know, it is about spelling.
 
Carlo_R.
Carlo_R.
@David However, Bye.
 
Mitch
Mitch
@Carlo_R. He would probably tell you to check out a map, and notice the distances.
 
Carlo_R.
Carlo_R.
9:45 PM
@Mitch do you know the distance? On my phone I have some difficulies to see a map.
 
Mitch
Mitch
@Cerberus I mean that, given that arabic, no let's use an abstract set up...given one language with one orthography, with an exact one-to-one pronunciation mapping...
one could imagine that any diachronic sound changes into varieties, could maintain the one-to-one mapping from pronunctiation to orthography.
@Carlo_R. though difficult can you see a world map at all on your phone?
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
@Mitch Yes, that is theoretically possible (though not practically). So...
 
Mitch
Mitch
@Cerberus right, probably not going to happen. but then, English (and in a different way Chinese varieties) is a bit of an outlier.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
@Mitch I mean spelling cannot keep up with pronunciation changes in any language.
 
Carlo_R.
Carlo_R.
@Mithc I do not know how many RAM my phone has, but a lot of page that are not in mobile version or with graphic elementes are closed by my phone.
But my phone shows a message "Spiacenti", which means "Apologize".
My phone is well educated!
 
tchrist
tchrist
10:01 PM
And polite, too.
 
Carlo_R.
Carlo_R.
@Mitch but I have a contract with the company that give me the phonme and the line.
 
Mitch
Mitch
Forget the contract for now. Forget distances for now. Do you know what country 'theater of Sidney' is in? Is that the same country as David?
 
Carlo_R.
Carlo_R.
And the contract finish on may 2013.
 
Mitch
Mitch
@Cerberus It could if we all wrote IPA! (but really, not)
 
Carlo_R.
Carlo_R.
@Mitch that structure is in north Australia, as far as I know.
 
Mitch
Mitch
10:05 PM
@Carlo_R. and David is in New Zealand, right? An island across the water from Australia.
 
tchrist
tchrist
@Mitch I think it is the other way around.
 
Mitch
Mitch
@tchrist With all due respect, I don't think so.
 
tchrist
tchrist
@Mitch Were you thinking they were on the same land mass, then?
 
Carlo_R.
Carlo_R.
@Mithc probably I'm confuse, but I read a comment by Mahnax where it wrote that NZ is at two hour of canoa from Australia.
 
Mitch
Mitch
@Carlo_R. do live on the coast of Italy or have ever been there? Can you see Africa from there?
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
10:08 PM
@Mitch Yeah, alas. For one thing, people don't know what they're saying, that is, they find it very hard to transcribe speech into IPA if they are used to seeing some other spelling. So if we pronounce word x as /blabla/, but our pronunciation gradually changed to /blahblah/, we would still "see" word x as written blabla in our minds, and we would think we were still pronouncing it /blabla/.
Part of that is due to the fact that we would sooner remap the IPA–sound pairs than change our perceived IPA rendering of what we consider the same "word" after a change.
 
Mitch
Mitch
@tchrist That's a conceptual possibility that is not borne out by the facts. NZ is across from Aust. not the other way around. Ask anybody from Australia. Pretty obvious.
 
Carlo_R.
Carlo_R.
Mitch Yes I live there, but I do not see Africa. @
 
Mitch
Mitch
@Cerberus That's not how you pronounce 'blah blah'. You should check a dictionary.
 
Carlo_R.
Carlo_R.
Now I understand what you say. NZ is too far from Australia to see each other.
 
Mitch
Mitch
@Carlo_R. Yes.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
10:11 PM
@Mitch Oh dammit. Or damned.
 
cornbread ninja
cornbread ninja
So, this lex person.
 
Carlo_R.
Carlo_R.
Wonderful, lex user have posted questions that, for now, have zero votes.
But, without ELL, this phenomenon cannot be limited.
I see a lot of questions to be closed in ELU future.
I like to post questions, but I'm no longer able to think one to post on main site.
So, I'm intersted in skeptics.se now, where one my recent question ishas being seen by more 1000 user, it seems.
 
tchrist
tchrist
@Mitch That's a conceptual possibility that is not borne out by the facts. Australia is across from New Zealand not the other wa around. Ask anybody from New Zealand. Pretty obvious. But the real question is, “Is Antarctica an island just across the water from New Zealand?”
 
Mitch
Mitch
10:46 PM
@tchrist Don't bring in irrelevancies like non-islands. They're not even in the same hemisphere. Look at the border. It's longer going from west to east than going east to west. That should be sufficient but for you I'd expect not. Also, they don't speak English in New Zealand. (one could question that about Australia, too, ha ha! I'm kidding). Anyway, you can see my house from here, and that really is the only measure.
 
tchrist
tchrist
Ceci n’est pas une isle.
 
Mitch
Mitch
My point exactly.
 
tchrist
tchrist
I dunno. I’ve seen good flicks with subtitles from New Zealand. Good thing, too.
 
Mitch
Mitch
Heavenly Creatures
 
tchrist
tchrist
Reo Māori
Ko te reo Māori te reo o te tangata whenua o Aotearoa. Nā te ture anō i whakamana te reo Māori hei reo a te motu o Aotearoa. 160,000 ngā kaikōrero reo Māori i Aotearoa, e ai ki te tatauranga tangata o te motu i te tau 1996. Ko ngā takiwā kaha ki te mau i te reo hei reo hapori ko Te Tai-tokerau, ko Te Urewera, ko Te Tai-rāwhiti. He reo o Porinīhia Ko te reo Māori nō te reo whānau o ngā iwi o Porinīhia ki te rāwhiti, arā he reo ka ahu mai nō te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, me te aha, e ōrite ana te reo Māori ki te reo o Rarotonga, o Manihiki-Rakahanga, o Tahiti, ā, o ngā moutere Tuamotu anō hoki. He ...
 
Mitch
Mitch
10:52 PM
Almost worse than Dutch.
 
tchrist
tchrist
Somebody was having a firesale on vowels.
 
Mitch
Mitch
Like Serbian? I think the Maoris snapped them all up.
 
tchrist
tchrist
> The modern Māori alphabet has 20 letters, two of which are digraphs: A Ā E Ē H I Ī K M N O Ō P R T U Ū W NG and WH.
That’s one way to put it, I suppose.
 
Mitch
Mitch
1/2 are vowels. Best ratio ever.
 
tchrist
tchrist
No voiced stops.
Nor corresponding fricatives.
 
Mitch
Mitch
10:59 PM
We could do better. 1 consonant; 1 vowels. We'd speak in binary( or realiy fibinary (look it up)) because every consonant has to be followed NBA vowel.
 
tchrist
tchrist
The <p> <t> <k> series are missing both <b> <d> <g> and also <f>/<ɸ>/<v>, <θ>/<ð>, and <ɣ̞> not to mention <β̞ > <ð̞ > <ɰ>. I do wonder how that happened.
And yes, it takes a lot of mousework to get those entered.
Apparently some speakers merge NG and N, or WH and W. So they have an even further reduced instruction set architecture.
Increasing the vowel ratio to over half.
Ah, the lurking mod finally bailed. Wonder what took him so long to decide I was no threat.
The Māori seems to have driven him away.
Or seem.
 
Mitch
Mitch
11:20 PM
@tchrist or just closed a browser window that had this as an inactive tab.
 
tchrist
tchrist
People certainly pronounce centaur a wide variety of ways. For some, it ends like tower, for others like tar, and for still others like tor. Odd.
I first starting hearing this quite recently, never having noticed it before.
It just happened again on the radio, where I heard yet another variant.
I can’t think of any other word where those three pronunciation variants exist for that one spelling (-aur).
It makes you wonder how they say minotaur and dinosaur.
 
tchrist
tchrist
11:39 PM
Hi Jasper.
 
user19161
@tchrist I use the last one. And I did not know CentOS is pronounced as Cent OS. I used to read it as cen-tos.
 
tchrist
tchrist
I use the last one, too.
As I do for dinosaur.
 
user19161
Also, I did not know that openSuse is read as opensuzer. I used opensoose.
 
tchrist
tchrist
It doesn’t. It reads as OpenSuza. :)
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
Hey, I have a question.
 
tchrist
tchrist
11:41 PM
Mirabile visu!
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
Ah yes. I was about to correct you!
What do you call it when you want to split a line into several lines?
 
tchrist
tchrist
My fngirs know knot what they od.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
You have a command that is very long.
 
tchrist
tchrist
@Cerberus Just that.
 
user19161
@Cerberus In formatting a document?
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
11:42 PM
And you want the command split into several lines.
 
tchrist
tchrist
I call fmt.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
@JasperLoy In programming.
 
tchrist
tchrist
fmt -30 splits each lines no longer than 30 characters each, not counting the newline.
 
user19161
@Cerberus I don't do programming, but I know of no such term. Split is all I know.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
@tchrist Split doesn't find anything.
I know AHK has a name for this.
I know it is done with dots.
But I can't find the help entry.
 
tchrist
tchrist
11:43 PM
"Done with dots"?
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
Concatenate lines...
I command you
 
tchrist
tchrist
Well yes, dots catenate lines.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
. to execute this command.
 
tchrist
tchrist
But you mean the opposite.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
I just want to find the help entry.
 
tchrist
tchrist
11:43 PM
Just say reformat.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
I want to split a string, which is (probably) troublesome.
 
tchrist
tchrist
You want to split it or reformat it or chop it up into smithereens.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
Yes.
Neither split nor reformat gives me anything.
 
tchrist
tchrist
Try chop.
Splice isn’t quite right.
Slice might work.
I wouldn’t put the smart money on smithereens, though.
Oh, I know.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
Yes, the entry is called Smithereens!
 
tchrist
tchrist
11:45 PM
Justify.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
Oh wait, that is something else.
 
tchrist
tchrist
It is the process of filling and adjusting.
In troff, .fi turns on fill mode and .ad turns on adjust mode. Together they implement justification.
OED has all these: smither smithereen smithereening smithereens smithers smithery.
That’s nice.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
Ahh it is called concatenation, but it doesn't have its own help entry.
 
tchrist
tchrist
But you described the inverse of concatenation.
Sounds screwy.
split and join are opposites, and join is a synonym of concatenate.
Pretty sure you were splitting.
Not joining.
 
MετάEd
MετάEd
@tchrist So procatenation.
 
tchrist
tchrist
11:51 PM
I still think it should just be catenation.
catenate /ˈkætɪneɪt/, v.
Etymology: f. L. catēnāt- ppl. stem of catēnāre (f. catēna chain); see -ate3.
1. trans. To connect like the links of a chain, to link, to string together; to form into a catena or series. Hence ˈcatenated ppl. a.
 
MετάEd
MετάEd
That's when you are turned into a cat.
 
tchrist
tchrist
I cannot see why we need to bring con into the matter.
catenation /kætɪˈneɪʃən/.
Etymology: ad. L. catēnātiōn-em, f. catēnāre; see prec.
1. A linking into a chain; connexion like that between the links of a chain; arrangement in a connected series; connected succession.
 
MετάEd
MετάEd
Catenate is to link; concatenate is to link together.
 
tchrist
tchrist
How does one link but together?
Keep it clean, now.
 
MετάEd
MετάEd
@tchrist Separately.
 
tchrist
tchrist
11:54 PM
concatenate /kɒnˈkætɪneɪt/, ppl. a.
Etymology: ad. L. concatēnāt-us, pa. pple. of concatēnāre: see next, and -ate2.
Chained together (obs.); linked together; concatenated. In Entom., etc. said of rows of processes connected by ridges, or the like.
concatenation /kɒnkætɪˈneɪʃən/.
Etymology: ad. L. concatēnātiōn-em, n. of action f. concatēnā-re: see prec. and -ation; cf. Fr. concaténation.
The action of concatenating, or the condition or relation of being concatenated.
1. Union by chaining or linking together; concatenated condition.
I just cannot see the difference.
I once tried to call the Perl "." operator its catenation operator and ".=" its concatenation operator, and Larry nearly popped me.
2
I can’t imagine why. :)
 
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