Hacker News Reader

Comment by redog | Hacker News Reader

Nah, that's the sarcasterisk and should replace /s in modern communication.

It also means three pointer dereferences in C++.

Looking forward to write such code:

  ⁂data = 42;

    (⁂^3)data = 42;

: droooop droop droop ;

Or the PostScript equivalent:

    /poop { pop pop } def       % number two
    /pooop { poop pop } def     % number three
    /poooop { poop poop } def   % number four

Inspired by graaand tradition of Lisp: http://clhs.lisp.se/Body/f_car_c.htm

Please submit a proposal for this.

Once Bjarne Stroustrup's "Generalizing Overloading for C++2000" proposal is accepted, they won't be able to say no to moving beyond the PDP-11 instruction set and directly supporting tri-dereferences.

https://www.stroustrup.com/whitespace98.pdf

>Instead, it was decided to by default limit identifiers to a single character:

    int xy; // error: two-character identifier

>This may seems Draconian at first. However, since we now have the full Unicode character set available, we don't actually need hard-to-read long names. Such long names only make code obscure by causing unpleasantly long lines and unnatural line breaks. Multi-character names are a relic of languages that relied heavily on global name and encouraged overly-large scopes.

Only acceptable if you can also spell it "cdddar".

Honestly explicit sarcasm indication should just die out entirely. Might as well be writing it longhand as "Just in case you missed it, this is a joke haha." every time you tell a joke.

This reasoning is nonsensical.

There is nothing to refute in it, but, just to prove it wrong: sarcasm is commonly denoted in spoken English by intonation.

And as we all know, it is impossible to imply tone in written text.

Exactly, it is the illusion of transparency. Have someone read something you've written out loud, you'd be surprised how often they use a different tone than you had in mind. Add to that a variety of cultures and backgrounds.

The comment you're replying to was being sarcastic. (I'm not sure about you!)

Ironically, proving the (wrong) point

Yes, I read it that way too. Which meant that they were under the impression that it is easy to infer tone, so I replied with a serious explanation why it may not be.

It is possible to do that, but sarcasm in written text uses a different notation: /s, which you just proposed to abolish above.

I don't like your replies, so I stop this conversation with you.

I’m not sure if you’re being serious or not. I’ve never met you and tone isn’t conveyed over text.

I’m assuming you’re joking, but maybe that’s exactly why we need explicit sarcasm demarcation.

Exactly right, and what I would add is that this is a Poe's Law thing.

I might even offer a corollary to that law, which is that the more unclear a statement is, the more inscrutable a it's intent, the more likely the original author will insist that it was 'obvious' sarcasm.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com