Changes in Google Groups - sources posted to Usenet lost forever?

On Sat, 28 Nov 2020 00:47:00 -0700, Don Y
<blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> wrote:

>On 11/27/2020 5:40 AM, Wojciech Zabolotny wrote:
> 
>> Here you are: https://groups.google.com/g/alt.sources/c/YeeAV3fBAVc/m/AZgPoFxS4NYJ
>> The Python code has completely removed indentation.
>
>Indentation and whitespace /tend/ to be insignificant to the operation
>of the code.  Of course, presence in string literals is a different
>story -- where even replacing tabs with spaces is a hazard.

In Python, indentation is required syntax: in general, it is an error
for code in the same scope not to be vertically aligned.

However, with a nested 'if-else', logic actually depends on the
indentation:

  if <expr1>:
    <statements1>
    if <expr2>:
      <statements2>
    else:

is very different from

  if <expr1>:
    <statements1>
    if <expr2>:
      <statements2>
  else:

In C the 'else' goes to the nearest 'if' regardless of whitespace.  In
Python, the 'else' goes to the nearest 'if' with which it vertically
aligned.


Significant whitespace sucks!
George

George Neuner <gneuner2@comcast.net> writes:
> Significant whitespace sucks!

You'll love my new language "Point Blank".  Its file extension is a
space character.

There is also my Haskell dialect for embedded microprocessors.  It is
called Control-H.  its file extension is a backspace.

;-)

On 11/29/2020 1:57 AM, George Neuner wrote:
> On Sat, 28 Nov 2020 00:53:43 -0700, Don Y
> <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> wrote:
> 
>> On 11/26/2020 9:14 PM, George Neuner wrote:
>>>
>>> On Thu, 26 Nov 2020 19:01:33 -0700, Don Y
>>> <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> wrote:
>>
>> Hi George!
>>
>> Have not heard from you in a while -- was beginning to think that you
>> may have been coviderated!  Hopefully, that's not the case (?)
> 
> Nope. I had a viral flu in early 2018 that had eerily similar symptoms
> to what is claimed for Covid-19: I was really sick with respiratory
> problems for ~5 weeks, and it was ~14 weeks before I really felt well
> again.  I was never hospitalized, so that virus was never identified,
> but I'm hoping that was a coronavirus because some studies in Europe
> found that prior exposure to other coronaviruses *may* give some
> increased resistance to this one.
> 
> In any event, I don't have your current email.

<frown>  I was evaluating lawyers and their ilk (good use
of that word in that context) a few months back and "consumed"
several email addresses in the process -- giving them out
"temporarily" and then canceling the accounts once I'd made
up my mind to cut off further communication from the
"undesirables" (Q:  are ANY of them "desirables"  :> )

I thought I'd picked accounts that I wasn't actively using.
But, may have screwed up.  I'll check my mail archive to
see what you were using to see if it was affected.

In either case, you should have a couple of addresses for me (?)

>>>> Are you sure the "corruption" can't be stripped from the post
>>>> with a filter (script)?
>>>
>>> The junk is HTML formatting.  The worry is that things like C++ source
>>> legitimately may contain angle bracket delimited text.  You'd need a
>>> smart filter that understands HTML tags.
>>
>> Or, scrape the posts manually?  E.g., highlight text in browser,
>> copy, paste?
> 
> Laborious if someone posted a long program.

Of course.  My point was that the "content" isn't really "lost",
just less easily accessed!

(I had to resort to scans of much of my earliest work to get
them back into electronic form)

>> If posted as an "image" of text (to deliberately hinder capture),
>> a screen capture program feeding an OCR... and manual touch-up.
> 
> Yuck! On average OCR still makes ~1 mistake per line.

I've not seen that sort of problem with good images.  Much worse
with scanned stuff (esp if scanned at too low resolution).

In any case, it appears that much of the delimiters that SHAR introduces
are arbitrarily removed from those posts.  Perhaps google thinking
a leading nonspace character is indicative of an indent level
in quoting?  (you can specify which character to use in many MUAs)

>> Though, having seen Wojciech's example, it appears that there is
>> more involved than just eliding HTML tags!  I've not actively studied
>> the (apparent) transformation to try to codify the rules that may
>> have been applied...
> 
> The problem there is Python. For almost any other language, your idea
> of scraping it manually would work.  For Python, you have to
> understand the logic to reinstate the required indentation.
> 
> I have always been opposed to significant whitespace in a language.

On 11/29/2020 2:16 AM, George Neuner wrote:
> On Sat, 28 Nov 2020 00:47:00 -0700, Don Y
> <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> wrote:
> 
>> On 11/27/2020 5:40 AM, Wojciech Zabolotny wrote:
>>
>>> Here you are: https://groups.google.com/g/alt.sources/c/YeeAV3fBAVc/m/AZgPoFxS4NYJ
>>> The Python code has completely removed indentation.
>>
>> Indentation and whitespace /tend/ to be insignificant to the operation
>> of the code.  Of course, presence in string literals is a different
>> story -- where even replacing tabs with spaces is a hazard.
> 
> In Python, indentation is required syntax: in general, it is an error
> for code in the same scope not to be vertically aligned.

Sorry, I didn't even examine the "content" of the archive; rather,
concentrated on the "SHAR wrapper" as it was quite obviously
corrupted.

> However, with a nested 'if-else', logic actually depends on the
> indentation:
> 
>    if <expr1>:
>      <statements1>
>      if <expr2>:
>        <statements2>
>      else:
> 
> is very different from
> 
>    if <expr1>:
>      <statements1>
>      if <expr2>:
>        <statements2>
>    else:
> 
> In C the 'else' goes to the nearest 'if' regardless of whitespace.  In
> Python, the 'else' goes to the nearest 'if' with which it vertically
> aligned.

Yes.  I dislike Python as my naming and coding styles rely on long
logical lines.  I prefer to let a pretty-printer clean up my
code to my own coding standards (indents, braces, function templates,
etc.) than to let the language dictate what my code HAS TO look like.

[I most often don't write in an IDE so can't rely on the "editor"
to "correct" formatting for me if, for example, I prepend an "if"
to a block of code or wrap it into some other explicit block]

> Significant whitespace sucks!

There are still places where a space is not a space and you have to
deal with it.  I frequently find tabs and spaces interchanged for
each other when cutting and pasting across systems; the machine
sees things that the human doesn't care about.  Try CONCLUSIVELY
sorting out whether you're looking at " \t", "     " or "\t " (or
variations thereof) from a paper printout!

But, there are also annoyances with things as banal as typefaces
that needlessly confound.

Or, displays that have opted to use particular glyphs that
can't readily be resolved as being rightside up or upside
down.  Is "529" five hundred and twenty nine?  Or, six hundred
and twenty five?