161–170 of 200 posts
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.g…
Not only the manual, but Gnus itself. I remember this guy from the university (UiO) when he started working on Gnus. He was a small celebrity among us informatics students, and we all used Emacs and Gnus, of course.
Gnus was absolutely delightful back in the day. I moved on around the time I had to start writing non-plaintext emails for work reasons. It's also handy to be using the same general email apps and systems as 99.99% of the rest of the world. I still have a soft spot in my heart for it.
PS: Also, I have no idea whatsoever why someone would downvote you for that. Weird.
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Hey, POP3 still makes sense. Having a local copy of your emails is useful.
Isn’t the only difference between pop and imap that pop removes the mail from the server? I only use imap, and all my email is available offline.
IMAP is an interactive protocol that is closer to the interaction between Gmail frontend and backend. It does many things. The client implements a local view of a central source of truth.
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As I understand it (this may be apocryphal but I've seen it in multiple places) the print head on simple-minded output devices didn't move fast enough to get all the way back over to the left before it started to output the next character. Making LF a separate character to be issued after CR meant that the line feed would happen while the carriage was returning, and then it's ready to print the next character. This l…
I don't think that's right. Not saying that to argue, more to discuss this because it's fun to think about. In any event, wouldn't you have to either buffer or use flow-control to pause receiving while a CR was being processed? You wouldn't want to start printing the next line's characters in reverse while the carriage was going back to the beginning. My suspicion is there was a committee that was more bent on purity…
If you look at the schematics for an ASR-33, there's just 2 transistors in the whole thing (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1acB3nhXU1Bb7YhQZcCb5jBA8cer...). Even the serial decoding is done electromechanically (per https://www.pdp8online.com/asr33/asr33.shtml), and the only "flow control" was that if you sent XON, the teletype would start the paper tape reader -- there was no way, as far as I can tell, for the teletype to ask the sender to pause while it processes a CR.
These things ran at 110 baud. If you can't do flow control, your only option if CR takes more than 1/10th of a second is to buffer... but if you can't do flow control, and the computer continues to send you stuff at 110 baud, you can't get that buffer emptied until the computer stops sending, so each subsequent CR will fill your buffer just a little bit more until you're screwed. You need the character following CR (which presumably takes about 2/10ths of a second) to be a non-printing character... so splitting out LF as its own thing gives you that and allows for the occasional case where doing a linefeed without a carriage return is desirable.
Curious Marc (https://www.curiousmarc.com/mechanical/teletype-asr-33) built a current loop adapter for his ASR-33, and you'll note that one of the features is "Pin #32: Send extra NUL character after CR (helps to not loose first char of new line)" -- so I'd guess that on his old and probably worn-out machine, even sending LR after CR doesn't buy enough time and the next character sometimes gets "lost" unless you send a filler NUL.
Now, I haven't really used serial communications in anger for over a decade, and I've never used a printing terminal, so somebody with actual experience is welcome to come in and tell me I'm wrong.
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It took me years to notice, but did you catch that the answer actually subtly misinterprets what the question is asking for? Guy (in my reading) appears to talk about matching an entire HTML document with regex. Indeed, that is not possible due to the grammars involved. But that is not what was being asked. What was being asked is whether the individual HTML tags can be parsed via regex. And to my understanding those…
I think even for single opening tags like asked there are impossible edge cases. For example, this is perfectly valid XHTML: />">
I wrote my own email archiving software. The hardest part was dealing with all the weird edge cases in my 20+ year collection of .eml files. For being so simple conceptually, email is surprisingly complicated.
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I don't think that's right. Not saying that to argue, more to discuss this because it's fun to think about. In any event, wouldn't you have to either buffer or use flow-control to pause receiving while a CR was being processed? You wouldn't want to start printing the next line's characters in reverse while the carriage was going back to the beginning. My suspicion is there was a committee that was more bent on purity…
I've seen this explanation multiple times through the years, but as I said it's entirely possible it was just a post-hoc thing somebody came up with. But as you said, it's fun to argue/think about, so here's some more. I'm talking about the ASR-33 because they're the archetypal printing terminal in my mind. If you look at the schematics for an ASR-33, there's just 2 transistors in the whole thing ( https://drive.goog…
But see, that's why I think there has to be more to it. That extra LF character wouldn't be enough to satisfy the timing requirements, so you'd also need to send NUL to appropriately pad the delay time. And come to think of it, the delay time would be proportional to the column the carriage was on when you sent the CR, wouldn't it? I guess it's possible that it always went to the end but that seems unlikely, not least because if that were true then you'd never need to send CR at all, just send NUL or space until you calculated it was at EOL.