* Thomas Bushnell, BSG | No, the point (which, I labor to repeat, was not mine, and is one that | CL programmers seem to frequently lament) is that not everything that | fits the *syntax* of a variable name can be used as one.
What on earth are you you talking about? Is it a "problem" that a symbol that has been pervasively declared special cannot be lexically bound, too? Do you want _syntax_ to distinguish specials and contants? Or what?
| It's a minor design wart, that's all.
You have clearly not understand what a constant variable is. You probably have not even understood special binding, either.
How many warts does Scheme have from an ML point of view? Would that be a fair way to argue about language warts, or would you prefer to speak about language Scheme warts relative to Scheme's design? If so, why on earth are you talking about warts in Common Lisp relative to Scheme's design goals? With all this talk about eval-time environments, you still do not seem to manage the concept of a context in human communication.
/// -- In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none. In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.
Erik Naggum <e...@naggum.net> writes: > That he cannot distinguish between his professional role and his personal > opinions, is.
Are you counting out the possibility that these two interests may coincide? That lisp vendors actually may be interested in a more friendly climate in comp.lang.lisp?
C.l.l is a phantastic forum for knowledge transfer and community building. Even in the noisy scheme vs. CL thread, I've read a lot of really insightful comments, especially from Kent Pitman and you (which e.g. helped me understand why I like CL and have a distaste for scheme myself). But the noise level is high, and the level of rudeness is sometimes quite unnecessary. So in its current state, I don't think c.l.l. is something lisp vendors can point at and say: "Look here and see how the lisp community is thriving, see how helpful it is!" (as an example of the opposite, flame wars are virtually non-existant on the quite active info-mcl mailing list).
I can _understand_ why you and others react the way you do sometimes, but I don't think it's a wise thing to do. This is something I try to tell my kids as well (I'm a person who has a tendency to shout loud when I really dislike something, so I speak of experience...): Try to react as polite and calm as you can. By overreacting in a dispute, you only risk being regarded as the "impossible" party. -- (espen)
Bijan Parsia wrote: > Outsider ~= ignorance and not caring > about that ignorance.
Huh? My argument was not that the outsider was ignorant, but that to the outsider the differences may be inconsequential... i.e. Being fully aware of the differences (not ignorant of them) and not caring about them...
The rest of your argument rests on _your_ assumption of ignorance on the part of the outsider.
I don't think I painted the outsider as a *stupid* jerk. Jerk, maybe. It's possible to be fully aware of the intricacies of christianity, or lisp, and _still_ recognise that roman catholic., the orthodox churches and the various flavours of protestant churches are all subsets of "christianity", or that christianity, islam and judaism are all subsets of "monotheistic religion", just as one could recognise that scheme or common lisp are subsets of some "lisp" ideal, and that the "lisp" ideal is a subset of "programming language concepts".
> But I think it's generally thought by Lispers that it's a shame that > plists and alists have different structure, and if it were to be > done over again, plists would have the alist structure. So you > can't destructure a plist easily, but except when actually dealing > with plists, you are advised in Common Lisp to use alists instead, > in general.
In article <kw663u3u1x....@merced.netfonds.no>, Espen Vestre wrote: > Erik Naggum <e...@naggum.net> writes:
>> That he cannot distinguish between his professional role and his personal >> opinions, is.
> Are you counting out the possibility that these two interests may > coincide? > That lisp vendors actually may be interested in a more friendly > climate in comp.lang.lisp?
The best way to achieve a friendlier climate would be to post some friendly, helpful articles. Posting hidden attacks against regular posters now and then will be less effective, I'd say.
Regards, -- Nils Goesche "Don't ask for whom the <CTRL-G> tolls."
Erik Naggum <e...@naggum.net> writes: > I have read some of the most ludicrous nonsense about Common Lisp macros > in comp.lang.scheme
When did you read that? I've seen plenty of sentiment on c.l.s favoring define-macro (present in many Scheme implementations for a long time and analagous to CL's defmacro) over the hygienic define-syntax introduced in R5RS.
I can neither remember nor google anything on c.l.s about Common Lisp macros specifically.
-- <brlewis@[(if (brl-related? message) ; Bruce R. Lewis "users.sourceforge.net" ; http://brl.sourceforge.net/ "alum.mit.edu")]>
Erik Naggum <e...@naggum.net> writes: > However, if he goes to a forum for people who like Common Lisp and > expresses the same opinion, it is no longer an opinion he is entitled to > express in that forum.
Except that nobody here has been saying that Common Lisp sucks.
> > But I think it's generally thought by Lispers that it's a shame that > > plists and alists have different structure, and if it were to be > > done over again, plists would have the alist structure. So you > > can't destructure a plist easily, but except when actually dealing > > with plists, you are advised in Common Lisp to use alists instead, > > in general.
> How do you come up with this stuff?
Um, it's true. plists and alists have unfortunately different representations, for historical reasons. The alist representation is better (for one thing, it's just prettier, but also, it allows for NIL properties).
plists are stuck with the first way, however, because there is just way too much code that knows how they work. But if you want to make your own assoc list, you always use the alist representation and not the plist representation, with the exception of what you store on actual symbols' plists.
In article <87k7s9aimy....@becket.becket.net>, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote: > Erik Naggum <e...@naggum.net> writes:
>> However, if he goes to a forum for people who like Common Lisp and >> expresses the same opinion, it is no longer an opinion he is entitled to >> express in that forum.
> Except that nobody here has been saying that Common Lisp sucks.
But that's exactly the impression you get when wading through these giant Scheme threads we have these days. Every day I open my news reader to read my beloved comp.lang.lisp, but all I get these days are hundreds of articles about Scheme. I don't *care* about Scheme. And I care even less about reading arguments trying to convince me that I should rather use some ``eugenic'' macros or some such to replace my beloved Common Lisp macros. Can't people at least use some name that isn't clearly intended to be insulting when talking about these things on comp.lang.lisp? How about calling them ``castrated'' macros instead?
Regards, -- Nils Goesche "Don't ask for whom the <CTRL-G> tolls."
Nils Goesche <car...@cartan.de> writes: > But that's exactly the impression you get when wading through these > giant Scheme threads we have these days. Every day I open my news > reader to read my beloved comp.lang.lisp, but all I get these days > are hundreds of articles about Scheme. I don't *care* about Scheme.
Huh? An article that says Common Lisp sucks is not an article about Scheme.
In any case, I would suggest you use a newsreader that enables you to cleanly ignore all the articles with the term "Scheme" in them.
> > > But I think it's generally thought by Lispers that it's a shame that > > > plists and alists have different structure, and if it were to be > > > done over again, plists would have the alist structure. So you > > > can't destructure a plist easily, but except when actually dealing > > > with plists, you are advised in Common Lisp to use alists instead, > > > in general.
> > How do you come up with this stuff?
> Um, it's true. plists and alists have unfortunately different > representations, for historical reasons. The alist representation is > better (for one thing, it's just prettier, but also, it allows for NIL > properties).
Both representations take the same conses. Some people disagree that alist notation is better because they don't like the way the dot is presented conditionally. (A . (B C)) does not print that way. Some people use (A (B C)) as the notation just to get better printing, at the expense of a cons in storage and a cdr in access. I don't think that's unambiguously pretty. Furthermore, NIL is certainly possible in both properties and alists. (GET-PROPERTIES 'X '(FOO)) will tell the difference, as will (GET 'X 'FOO *MISSING*).
A real difference between plists and alists is that better operations are provided for plists in CL than alists [this is an arbitrary and fixable problem] because SETF of GET/GETF has no analog in the alist domain.
Another difference is that the "locative" (a cell to which you could make a datastructure modification) of (GET 'X 'FOO) is "the rest of the plist" from (FOO 7 BAR 9 ...) and so reveals data that is not part of the answer; while the locative of the analogous ASSOC call reveals no such unrelated data. (FOO . 7) does not reveal a subsequent (BAR . 9). On the other hand, the locative result also contains information that allows resuming the search while for alists there is no way to resume because the tail is not returned.
> plists are stuck with the first way, however, because there is just > way too much code that knows how they work.
I don't know what this means. That's true of all successful data and its associated operations. It's not a linguistic criticism other than the use of the pejorative word "stuck".
> But if you want to make > your own assoc list, you always use the alist representation and not > the plist representation, with the exception of what you store on > actual symbols' plists.
> > But that's exactly the impression you get when wading through these > > giant Scheme threads we have these days. Every day I open my news > > reader to read my beloved comp.lang.lisp, but all I get these days > > are hundreds of articles about Scheme. I don't *care* about Scheme.
> Huh? An article that says Common Lisp sucks is not an article about > Scheme.
Well, some of us have been around a while and recognize particular arguments as standard earmarks of someone who has happened into the wrong language community, that is, someone whose aesthetic sense is better satisfied by a language with a different axiomatic/design base.
People often ask questions of "why is it thus" here and the answer is "this is a community built on two major things: compatibility where things are not broken, and getting a usable result where things are broken". We have not obsessed in this community over "whether there was another way". We want to move forward and unless we are shown we are in an out-and-out hill-climbing problem, we are not likely to look back and say "gosh, were there other ways?" There are other languages that do differently, and that sit in a loop forever questioning whether they have done the right thing.
Scheme was held back for a couple years trying to decide if (define (f x) x) was a substitute for (define f (lambda (x) x)) or whether there was "not enough community consensus".
In my life, I want to have gotten to new vistas to talk about. I don't want to keep repeating the same battles. I want it to be enough that what we did we did for a reason. I don't care a hoot about showing that it was the best reason, which I consider a waste of the only truly valuable commodity in life: time.
It's one thing to suggest that a system is absolutely so bankrupt that it cannot survive the decision it made, but there is no evidence that CL has done that. And people who want to turn this into a conversation on "wouldn't modules be better than packages" or "isn't call/cc better than catch" or "aren't fully general functions better than keywords" or "isn't this macro scheme better than that macro scheme" are just repeating the past. They are not doing e-commerce or driving spaceships or making search engines come up with better results or making good people's credit card applications get bounced less often or finding terrorists nor writing programs that make poetry or music.
> In any case, I would suggest you use a newsreader that enables you to > cleanly ignore all the articles with the term "Scheme" in them.
When someone comes to the US Republic party convention and says "why don't we spend more on social programs? why don't we eschew the religious right? etc." it doesn't always contain the word "Democrat" in the text, but it's not uncommon for the suggestion to be "you might be better placed elsewhere". That person may not agree, but it's the right of the people of the community to choose to abstract the issue that way because it's highly predictive of not only that conversation but of future ones.
[Btw, I'm an independent and don't like either party, just about equally. I'm just using this as an exmaple, so let's not debate US politics..]
> Furthermore, NIL is certainly possible in both properties and > alists. (GET-PROPERTIES 'X '(FOO)) will tell the difference, as > will (GET 'X 'FOO *MISSING*).
I'm sorry, I was totally wrong in what I wrote about NIL on plists; of course it can be there and the accessor functions have been sensitive to it for ages. I think my brain was caffeine-starved or something.
Over the course of many years. The hostility towards "non-hygienic" macros has been extremely tense, and the anger directed at Common Lisp has been very strong at times. I investigated Scheme thoroughly when I had gotten fed up with C++ and decided to find something else to do with my life than waste it away at idiotic languages.
| I can neither remember nor google anything on c.l.s about Common Lisp | macros specifically.
Maybe a less specific search will yield better results?
I find it odd that anyone would rise to try to claim that the Scheme community is not hostile to Common Lisp. It looks like an attempt to say "it's not our fault!", which only the bad guys need to say.
/// -- In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none. In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.
> > > But I think it's generally thought by Lispers that it's a shame that > > > plists and alists have different structure, and if it were to be > > > done over again, plists would have the alist structure. So you > > > can't destructure a plist easily, but except when actually dealing > > > with plists, you are advised in Common Lisp to use alists instead, > > > in general.
> > How do you come up with this stuff?
> Um, it's true. plists and alists have unfortunately different > representations, for historical reasons. The alist representation is > better (for one thing, it's just prettier,
There's nothing historical about the difference between plists and alists. Each have their pros and cons (excuse the pun :-). You've touched on some of alists' pros, now let me point out alists' cons (pun completely intended, here): there are more of them. In other words, plists take up less space, because they cons less.
> but also, it allows for NIL properties).
Huh? How is it not possible to have a nil plist value?
CL-USER(1): (list (getf '(b foo a nil) 'a :default) (getf '(b foo a nil) 'c :default)) (NIL :DEFAULT) CL-USER(2):
> plists are stuck with the first way, however, because there is just > way too much code that knows how they work. [...]
If we had it to do over again, I'd still fight to keep plists...
-- Duane Rettig Franz Inc. http://www.franz.com/ (www) 1995 University Ave Suite 275 Berkeley, CA 94704 Phone: (510) 548-3600; FAX: (510) 548-8253 du...@Franz.COM (internet)
> > > > But I think it's generally thought by Lispers that it's a shame that > > > > plists and alists have different structure, and if it were to be > > > > done over again, plists would have the alist structure. So you > > > > can't destructure a plist easily, but except when actually dealing > > > > with plists, you are advised in Common Lisp to use alists instead, > > > > in general.
> > > How do you come up with this stuff?
> > Um, it's true. plists and alists have unfortunately different > > representations, for historical reasons. The alist representation is > > better (for one thing, it's just prettier,
> There's nothing historical about the difference between plists and > alists. Each have their pros and cons (excuse the pun :-). You've > touched on some of alists' pros, now let me point out alists' cons > (pun completely intended, here): there are more of them. In other > words, plists take up less space, because they cons less.
Oops. I was wrong. Plists and alists do cons the same. I never think about it. I guess I would back off of my original statement and say that plists are represented with fewer parens, which could count as an aesthetic pro.
> > but also, it allows for NIL properties).
> Huh? How is it not possible to have a nil plist value?
> CL-USER(1): (list (getf '(b foo a nil) 'a :default) (getf '(b foo a nil) 'c :default)) > (NIL :DEFAULT) > CL-USER(2):
> > plists are stuck with the first way, however, because there is just > > way too much code that knows how they work. [...]
> If we had it to do over again, I'd still fight to keep plists...
I still stand by this, but for the same reason I would tend to remain inclusive about anything else in CL; CL is all about inclusiveness, and not about reduction to only one way of doing things.
-- Duane Rettig Franz Inc. http://www.franz.com/ (www) 1995 University Ave Suite 275 Berkeley, CA 94704 Phone: (510) 548-3600; FAX: (510) 548-8253 du...@Franz.COM (internet)
Nils Goesche <car...@cartan.de> writes: > The best way to achieve a friendlier climate would be to post some > friendly, helpful articles.
Well, comp.lang.lisp does actually already _has_ lots of friendly, helpful articles. The problem is that the *unfriendly* articles cause some newcomers leave immediately and some longterm members of the community to give up.
> Posting hidden attacks against regular posters now and then will > be less effective, I'd say.
Although I agree in principle, this description is unfair if applied as "an hidden attack" against any of the posters in question here. Google can confirm that.
Trivia: Google counts 219 occurences of "moron" in comp.lang.lisp. You can find a lot of important CL symbol names with a lower frequency than that... -- (espen)
* Espen Vestre | Are you counting out the possibility that these two interests may | coincide?
No. Using 23 lines of his 48-line "me too" article for advertising is an extremely poor professional as well as personal decision. Banner ads are bad enough on the Web. Here on USENET, we have a pretty general rule against advertising and for using only 4-line signatures. We also have a general rule against posting "me too" articles. I mean, America Online got to be synonymous with that kind of idiotic newbie behavior, and now it is used by a Lisp vendor to tell the world that not only is their German office run by a moron, they advertise in his moronic articles.
| That lisp vendors actually may be interested in a more friendly | climate in comp.lang.lisp?
Of course they are. Does it help to post idiotic "me too" posts with huge ads? No. Should they learn from this and avoid doing it in the future? Yes. Does it help to post idiotic "you other guys please use mail while I continue posting" posts? No. Should they learn from this and avoid doing it in the future? Yes. Has Rolf Mach done the same idiotic things before? Yes. Has he learned from it? No. Does he think that there is always something wrong with people who do not follow his rules? Yes. Is any of this an instance of _politeness_? No, most certainly not. Hence my reaction.
| Even in the noisy scheme vs. CL thread, I've read a lot of really | insightful comments, especially from Kent Pitman and you (which e.g. | helped me understand why I like CL and have a distaste for scheme myself).
I am happy about this.
| But the noise level is high, and the level of rudeness is sometimes quite | unnecessary.
I regret that, naturally, but in polite company, when someone tells you that you are doing something useless, you back down, you do _not_ start to yell back, defend yourself, or start telling stupid lies about the person who simply corrected something or made a joke you took personally to begin with. I actually criticize _actions_, but the response I get to that from the morons is 100% pure personal attacks.
| So in its current state, I don't think c.l.l. is something lisp vendors | can point at and say: "Look here and see how the lisp community is | thriving, see how helpful it is!" (as an example of the opposite, flame | wars are virtually non-existant on the quite active info-mcl mailing | list).
The list probably has a pretty specific purpose to which people adhere. The more people are aware of their purpose in doing something, the less they stray from it. I want the purpose here to be: Discuss Common Lisp, do not try to re-open old issues for the 4711th time, do not instigate trouble with open hostility towards things you do not "like". I argue that a professional _likes_ his tools, or he just uses different tools. A professional who dislikes his tools is a contradiction in terms. If you cannot stand the dirt you get under your fingernails in one line of work, get yourself a different job or another line of work.
The purpose of comp.lang.lisp is different to Scheme freaks and whiners: They want to spend all their time here attacking design decisions in Common Lisp which they use to fault somebody else for their own personal failure either to succeed with Common Lisp or to learn how to use it to solve their problems. All this idiocy about Python, for instance, is like going to a cat show and whine endlessly about how dogs are better than cats. Then there are the moronic "politeness crowd" which has no purpose here whatsoever, other than to harrass people with extremely impolite behavior of their own, as if anyone can achieve polite behavior out of others that way. For some curious reason, many of these are German and display an atrocious lack of taste when they are "offended", as if other people have a duty not to offend them, and if they do, they have the "right" to attack people viciously. Something is rotten in Germany. I believe you are in position to be fairly objective about this.
| I can _understand_ why you and others react the way you do sometimes, but | I don't think it's a wise thing to do.
Look, I tell people _politely_ but not necessarily _kindly_ that that they should do something else. 95% of the time, people get the message and never even get into a position they need to back down from. 5% of the time, they get themselves into such a position, and then do _not_ back down, but start taking _everything_ personally and feel hostility in everything I say, no matter what it is, and some even go so nuts they go on a fault-finding mission that lasts for years, just to take "revenge". There is clearly something wrong with such people.
| This is something I try to tell my kids as well (I'm a person who has a | tendency to shout loud when I really dislike something, so I speak of | experience...): Try to react as polite and calm as you can.
I do not shout, which my cat can attest to: She spends the time I spend with the keyboard lying in front of me on my desk, relaxing or sleeping on her back -- and she hates sharp noises of all kinds. I calmly ask people to go fuck themselves in real life, too, which has a much stronger effect on people. Some people, however, spend a lot of time fantasizing about screaming and foam coming out of my mouth, such as Thomas Bushnell did recently, and apparently have a strong personal need to demonize their opponent so they can feel good about their own downright atrocious and even evil behavior and relieve themselves of responsibility for it. Nothing makes people behave worse than believing that somebody else is to blame for their behavior. I consider it such an unintelligent thing to do that people who have stopped being responsible for their own actions must be psychotic or generally completely out of their mind and that there is no longer possible to talk to them -- one just has to wait until they regain their consciousness. For some it seems to take years.
| By overreacting in a dispute, you only risk being regarded as the | "impossible" party.
As if anything I do could possibly change that in the minds of the bad guys. If people have to reach their conclusions without thinking or without investigating causality and context, what do I care what they think? But _still_ some people pick a fight with me? I consider someone who does that to be retarded beyond recovery just there. I mean, the _only_ reason these shitheads keep fighting me is that they have come to the conclusion that they are no longer to blame for their own behavior. I want such people to show the whole world how they behave when they want others to behave. In short, if you cannot be polite when you ask other people to be polite, you _are_ an idiot. If you cannot do what you suggest that other people do, such as using mail instead of news, you _are_ an idiot. The curious thing with these people is that they are unable to stay reasonably on-topic and _also_ express their petty little moralistic gripes. They even actually think that if they find a word which is on _their_ "do not use" list, then there _cannot_ be anything technical in the same article. I want to see what kind of people are thusly retarded and unable to focus on their purpose of learning and using Common Lisp. I also want to give people a chance to show me what they focus on: If I have 90% technical content to an article and 10% stuff that some retard finds "offensive", and he responds only to those 10%, I know that his purpose is not compatible with this newsgroup -- his purpose in life is to make _other_ people behave, while he himself is free to do anything he goddamn pleases, including much worse insults than I ever use. I find this somewhat entertaining, actually, and I guess that gets communicated to the morons who keep kicking and screaming.
But since you ask so nicely, let me see if people get any less moronic and psychotic with less strongly-worded reactions. I strongly doubt it.
/// -- In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none. In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.
Espen Vestre <espen@*do-not-spam-me*.vestre.net> writes: > Although I agree in principle, this description is unfair if applied as > "an hidden attack" against any of the posters in question here. Google > can confirm that. > Trivia: Google counts 219 occurences of "moron" in comp.lang.lisp. You > can find a lot of important CL symbol names with a lower frequency > than that...
Speaking of hidden attacks...
-- -> -/ - Rahul Jain - \- <- -> -\ http://linux.rice.edu/~rahul -=- mailto:rj...@techie.com /- <- -> -/ "Structure is nothing if it is all you got. Skeletons spook \- <- -> -\ people if [they] try to walk around on their own. I really /- <- -> -/ wonder why XML does not." -- Erik Naggum, comp.lang.lisp \- <- |--|--------|--------------|----|-------------|------|---------|-----|-| (c)1996-2002, All rights reserved. Disclaimer available upon request.
Duane Rettig wrote: > Oops. I was wrong. Plists and alists do cons the same. I never think > about it. I guess I would back off of my original statement and say > that plists are represented with fewer parens, which could count as > an aesthetic pro.
Lookups in alists can be slightly faster on current hardware, I think.
Rahul Jain <rj...@sid-1129.sid.rice.edu> writes: > Additionally, they get to defame the name of Lisp by making people > think that it's as limited at Scheme. That's what I had thought from > my prior education, before being informed by Sriram Krishnamurthi and > c.l.l that Lisp really is very different from Scheme.
Shriram is a key member of the Scheme community, and a big proponent of the value of generalized call/cc. Scheme advocacy does not imply hostility toward Common Lisp, as your example shows.
-- <brlewis@[(if (brl-related? message) ; Bruce R. Lewis "users.sourceforge.net" ; http://brl.sourceforge.net/ "alum.mit.edu")]>
> Another difference is that the "locative" (a cell to which you > could make a datastructure modification) of (GET 'X 'FOO) is "the rest > of the plist" from (FOO 7 BAR 9 ...) and so reveals data that is not part > of the answer; while the locative of the analogous ASSOC call reveals no > such unrelated data. (FOO . 7) does not reveal a subsequent (BAR . 9). > On the other hand, the locative result also contains information that allows > resuming the search while for alists there is no way to resume because > the tail is not returned.
Well, it's not as convenient to resume, anyway. And it's less efficient. But you can certainly do:
Bruce Lewis <brls...@yahoo.com> writes: > Shriram is a key member of the Scheme community, and a big proponent of > the value of generalized call/cc. Scheme advocacy does not imply > hostility toward Common Lisp, as your example shows.
I never claimed it did. I claimed that _specific_ people did this kind of thing, and for no reason I can figure out. Why can't people just accept that CL and scheme have different design goals instead of arguing that one community has the "right" or "wrong" goals. It's either a goal you're interested in or one you're not interested in.
-- -> -/ - Rahul Jain - \- <- -> -\ http://linux.rice.edu/~rahul -=- mailto:rj...@techie.com /- <- -> -/ "Structure is nothing if it is all you got. Skeletons spook \- <- -> -\ people if [they] try to walk around on their own. I really /- <- -> -/ wonder why XML does not." -- Erik Naggum, comp.lang.lisp \- <- |--|--------|--------------|----|-------------|------|---------|-----|-| (c)1996-2002, All rights reserved. Disclaimer available upon request.
Rahul Jain <rj...@sid-1129.sid.rice.edu> writes: > > Trivia: Google counts 219 occurences of "moron" in comp.lang.lisp. You > > can find a lot of important CL symbol names with a lower frequency > > than that...
Erik Naggum <e...@naggum.net> writes: > All this idiocy about Python, for instance, is like going to a cat > show and whine endlessly about how dogs are better than cats.
LOL :-)
> out of others that way. For some curious reason, many of these are > German and display an atrocious lack of taste when they are "offended", > as if other people have a duty not to offend them, and if they do, they > have the "right" to attack people viciously. Something is rotten in > Germany. I believe you are in position to be fairly objective about this.
What is considered as polite is strongly flavoured by your cultural background. For instance: In most other european countries, the default greeting behaviour ("good morning" is a very rare thing to hear, except when there are Swedes in the neighborhood ;-)) of norwegians is probably considered unbelievably rude.
There's no reason to draw any wide-reaching conclusions from these differences, but they are yet another reason why one should try to keep discourse at a polite level in an international forum like this one. -- (espen)
