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the meaning of rﾕ.......ï¾

Roy Smith roy at panix.com
Mon Jul 23 08:55:22 EDT 2012 
In article <500d0632$0$1504$c3e8da3$76491128 at news.astraweb.com>,
 Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> 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''.
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