[lug] Perl question: how to print embedded metacharacters

[Davide Del Vento]

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 16:57, Tom Christiansen <tchrist at perl.com> wrote:
>>On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 15:32, Tom Christiansen <tchrist at perl.com> wrote:
>>> Don't accept bad wrapping: Fix it!
>
>> Tom, these days lot of folks (including myself) use web-based
>> "clients" on which we basically don't have much control. Have you ever
>> heard of gmail? It's so much convenient, and it understands past
>> messages by itself that basically you don't care at all how's quoted:
>> it just works. Now, I'm sad to know that's incompatible with your
>> client, but it's so much convient that I'll stick with it no matter
>> how loud you and Stallman will complain (and I'm a FSF member, so I do
>> care and I am sad about it!)
>
> Mail that's too difficult to read simply doesn't get read.  There aren't
> many pieces of mail that I judge of sufficient interest to bother dumping
> an hour or two of my time into thoughtful recoding.
>
> It's just like when I get a Microsoft document as email.  I simply flush it.
> If someone sends me crud, I delete it.  It's like someone calling me up and
> speaking in Chinese.  Sure, I could learn Chinese.  Or they could talk to me
> in English.  There aren't many scenarios where it's worth learning Chinese.
>
> I used to return garbled mail.  Now I don't even bother.  If it's important,
> they'll call or learn to use English.  Or Spanish.  Or French.
>
> But not Russian.  I can only go so far.

I'm from Italy. When my father was kid, they taught English or French,
or Spanish, as a second language. When I was kid, they taught English
or French. Now, they teach only English, because nobody cares anymore
about French or Spanish (at least not in Italy).
The world changes, and so do informatics.

I used to do the same as you, but now, OpenOffice does a quite good
job in showing M$ documents: I don't send garbled mail or "no word
attachments" anymore. I just grin and bear it. But I understand your
point, because it was exactly my point when I was using pine on a
text-only terminal and I couldn't read message (or I could read them
only after very painful efforts).

What I meant with my message were actually three separate things,
which I restate here for sake of clarity:

1) you can probably use a better client that will help with the
problem you are experiencing (gmail is one of them, thunderbird is
another, but only if you turn threading on). If your phone is old and
creaks, you cannot (only) blame your speaker because she has a speach
impairment. Yes, she is half of the problem, but not the whole.

2) even willing, people will not agree on what's the best way to do
things: your best way of quoting and coding, might well be somebody
else nightmare

3) even if an agreement is reached, some people have very little
control on what their clients do, unlike in the ole pine days. It's
called "cloud computing" and it means: "try to move the cloud where
you like it to go: it won't, it'll go only where the wind is blowing".
Why do people use it? Because is so much convenient! The cloud is
there and you just have to jump on it (it's free, no airplane tickets
to buy, no gas to refill, no driver/pilote license). If I had to
follow this mailing list with Thunderbird or pine, I'll give up on the
second day. With gmail, it does all the dirty work itself, without my
intervention at all. Which is convenient, but it means that I cannot
hack as much as I'd like, when something is broken (e.g. I cannot
change the way it wraps). I'm sad when this hurts my recipients, but
since the whiners are a very small percentage (actually, just one),
then I'm staying with the convenience.

I hope to not start a flame on this issue, though.

Happy Thanksgiving!
;Dav