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What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

lars.ingebrigtsen.no

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Re: What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

#111

Post by scott_s »

bobince wrote: post #94
kapep wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The regex answer is from the very old days of Stackoverflow, before fun was banned. I agree it barely qualifies as answer, but considering that the question has over 4 million page views (which almost puts it in the top 100 most viewed questions all-time), it has reached a lot people. The answer probably had much more influence than any serious answer on that topic. So I'd say the author did a good job.

Of all the things I wrote on SO, including many actually-useful detailed explanations, it was this drunken rant that stuck, for some reason.

I think of, and look up, this drunken rant at least once a year.

Re: What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

#112

Post by School-Cotton »

lvncelot wrote: post #60
ruhith wrote: post #38

[dead]

> It's the same class of bug as manually parsing HTML with regex, it works right up until it doesn't I'm sure you already know this one, but for anyone else reading this I can share my favourite StackOverflow answer of all time: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454

Funny how differently people can perceive things. That's my least favorite SO answer of all time, and I cringe every time I see it.

It's a very bad answer. First of all, processing HTML with regex can be perfectly acceptable depending on what you're trying to do. Yes, this doesn't include full-blown "parsing" of arbitrary HTML, but there are plenty of ways in which you might want to process or transform HTML that either don't require producing a parse tree, don't require perfect accuracy, or are operating on HTML whose structure is constrained and known in advance. Second, it doesn't even attempt to explain to OP why parsing arbitrary HTML with regex is impossible or poorly-advised.

The OP didn't want his post to be taken over by someone hamming it up with an attempt at creative writing. He wanted a useful answer. Yes, this answer is "quirky" and "whimsical" and "fun" but I read those as euphemisms for "trying to conscript unwilling victims into your personal sense of nerd-humor".

Re: What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

#113

Post by kstrauser »

jcynix wrote: post #99
Pinus wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can remember, most mail servers were fairly sane about that sort of thing, even back in the 90’s when this stuff was introduced. However, there were always these more or less motivated fears about some server somewhere running on some ancient IBM hardware using EBCDIC encoding and truncating everything to 72 characters because its model of the world was based on punched cards. So standards were written to…

EBCDIC wasn't the problem, this was (part of) the problem: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.1.0?topic=execution-systsi... And BITNET …

> EBCDIC wasn't the problem

Wake up, everyone! Brand new sentence just dropped!

Re: What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

#114

Post by philistine »

School-Cotton wrote: post #112
lvncelot wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the same class of bug as manually parsing HTML with regex, it works right up until it doesn't I'm sure you already know this one, but for anyone else reading this I can share my favourite StackOverflow answer of all time: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454

Funny how differently people can perceive things. That's my least favorite SO answer of all time, and I cringe every time I see it. It's a very bad answer. First of all, processing HTML with regex can be perfectly acceptable depending on what you're trying to do. Yes, this doesn't include full-blown "parsing" of arbitrary HTML, but there are plenty of ways in which you might want to process or transform HTML that eit…

The whole argument hinges on one word in your post: arbitrary.

I parse my own HTML I produce directly in a context where I fully control the output. It works fine, but parsing other people’s HTML is a lesson in humility. I’ve also done that, but I did it as a one time thing. I parsed a specific point in time, refusing to change that at any point.

Re: What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

#115

Post by kstrauser »

For context, this is the Lars Ingebrigtsen who wrote the manual for Gnus[0], a common Emacs package for reading email and Usenet. It’s clever, funny, and wildly informative. Lars has probably forgotten more about email parsing than 99% of us here will ever have learned.

The manual itself says[1]:

> Often when I read the manual, I think that we should take a collection up to have Lars psycho-analysed.

0: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/gnus.htm...

1: https://www.gnus.org/manual.html

Re: What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

#116

Post by kstrauser »

Telemakhos wrote: post #64
liveoneggs wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how email work(ed) over smtp. When each command was sent it would get a '200'-class message (success) or 400/500-class message (failure). Sound familiar? telnet smtp.mailserver.com 25 HELO MAIL FROM: me@foo.com RCPT TO: you@bar.com DATA blah blah blah how's it going? talk to you later! . QUIT

This brings back some fun memories from the 1990s when this was exactly how we would send prank emails.

Yep! And also, if you included a blank line and then the headers for a new email in the bottom of your message, you could tell the server, hey, here comes another email for you to process!

If you were typing into a feedback form powered by something from Matt’s Script Archive, there was about a 95% chance you could trivially get it to send out multiple emails to other parties for every one email sent to the site’s owner.

Re: What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

#117

Post by bombcar »

1718627440 wrote: post #81
bayesnet wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is grumpy but this I’ve never liked this answer. It is a perfect encapsulation of the elitism in the SO community—if you’re new, your questions are closed and your answers are edited and downvoted. Meanwhile this is tolerated only because it’s posted by a member with high rep and username recognition.

I think this answer was tolerated when SO wasn't as bad as it is now, and wouldn't be tolerated now from anyone.

It's because SO at the time was a small high-trust society where "everyone knew each other" and so things flew back then that wouldn't fly now.

Re: What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

#118

Post by bityard »

josefx wrote: post #61
lvncelot wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the same class of bug as manually parsing HTML with regex, it works right up until it doesn't I'm sure you already know this one, but for anyone else reading this I can share my favourite StackOverflow answer of all time: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454

I prefer the question about CPU pipelines that gets explained using a railroad switch as example. That one does a decent job of answering the question instead of going of on a, how to best put it, mentally deranged one page rant about regexes with the lazy throw away line at the end being the only thing that makes it qualify as an answer at all.

But--and this is crucial--the one about regexes is hilarious.

It also comes from a time in Internet culture when humor was appreciated instead of aggressively downvoted.

Re: What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

#119

Post by kstrauser »

liveoneggs wrote: post #48
codingdave wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that in ye olden days, email was not a worldwide communication method. It was more typical for it to be an internal-only mail system, running on whatever legacy mainframe your org had, and working within whatever constraints that forced. So in the 90s when the internet began to expand, and email to external organizations became a bigger thing, you were just as concerned with compatibility with all those…

This is incorrect

Are you certain? Not OP, but a huge chunk of early RFCs was about how to let giant IBM systems talk to everyone else, specifying everything from character sets (nearly universally “7-bit ASCII”) to end of line/message characters. Otherwise, IBM would’ve tried to make EBCDIC the default for everything.

For instance, consider FTP’s text mode, which was primarily a way to accidentally corrupt your download when you forgot to type “bin” first, but was also handy for getting human readable files from one incompatible system to another.

Re: What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

#120

Post by ahoka »

fluoridation wrote: post #73
direwolf20 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SMTP is a line–based protocol, including the part that transfers the message body The server needs to parse the message headers, so it can't be an opaque blob. If the client uses IMAP, the server needs to fully parse the message. The only alternative is POP3, where the client downloads all messages as blobs and you can only read your email from one location, which made sense in the year 2000 but not now when everyone…

Hey, POP3 still makes sense. Having a local copy of your emails is useful.

But it's more akin to consuming a message queue. You have fetched it, it's gone.
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