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Yes. You can argue about the bytestrings being identical until the cows come home, but the vast majority of people believe that natural language text has invisi
by fwlr 4y ago
Yes. You can argue about the bytestrings being identical until the cows come home, but the vast majority of people believe that natural language text has invisible metadata tags denoting who wrote it and why. When the task is “communicating with people”, you have to respect their consensus reality.
- andrewfromx 4y agoWarning: cows coming home. Invisible meta tags? That sounds like a religion faith argument vs science! Something we can’t see and a string comparison == comes back true and yet somehow there is a difference? ASCII text is just numbers. If all the numbers are the same I don’t see where the invisible meta tags exist unless you mean like in a spiritual plane.
- fwlr 4y agoNo, you’re right, the invisible metatags do not exist, not even in a spiritual plane. Nevertheless, most people believe they do exist, although they would not use the phrase “invisible metatags”. To put the “respect their consensus reality” claim into a different format: every computer’s implementation of == will return true for the two strings, but most human brain implementations of == will return false - i.e. the difference isn’t in the string, it’s in the comparator function. The human brain implementation is obviously bugged, but the maintainer (whether God or evolution) isn’t accepting pull requests, so the bug is unlikely to ever be fixed. If you have to interface with the human implementation anyway, you simply have to account for this oddity. It’s like supporting Internet Explorer on your website.
- andrewfromx 4y agoWow. Great analogy with IE! You make good points. Touché.