An intelligence that reasons this way would be, in human terms, batshit insane and completely immoral. So, it seems unlikely that many or maybe any humans would experience it as "otherwise benign" if it had power over their lives.
And if we do get an all-powerful dictator, we will be screwed regardless of whether their governing intelligence is artificial or composed of a group of humans or of one human (with, say, powerful AIs serving them faithfully, or access to some other technology).
See https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/wiki/GUI-and-TUI for a standalone GUI and two VS Code plugins. None of the GUIs there are fully-featured, so sometimes you have to imagine what it could become, but each one is usable. The two VS Code plugins can be used at the same time and complement each other somewhat.
I think that, since you don't allow `sql(t"SELECT {a-1}")`, you should allow `sql(t"SELECT {}", a - 1)`, as long as that is possible with t-strings. This would be similar to Rust's `format!` then.
Ah, apparently with real t-strings, `t"SELECT {a-1}"` should be allowed while `t"SELECT {}"` is not.
Here is Python master branch:
Python 3.15.0a0 (heads/main:ea2d707bd5, May 16 2025, 12:20:56) [Clang 16.0.0 (clang-1600.0.26.6)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> t"Hello {a}"
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<python-input-1>", line 1, in <module>
t"Hello {a}"
^
NameError: name 'a' is not defined
>>> a=3
>>> t"Hello {a+5}"
Template(strings=('Hello ', ''), interpolations=(Interpolation(8, 'a+5', None, ''),))
>>> t"Hello {}"
File "<python-input-6>", line 1
t"Hello {}"
^
SyntaxError: t-string: valid expression required before '}'
It's a clever format, especially if the focus is on machines generating it and humans or machines reading it. It might even work for humans occasionally making minor edits without having to load the file in the spreadsheet.
I think it can encode anything except for something matching the regex `(\t+\|)+` at the end of cells (*Update:* Maybe `\n?(\t+\|)+`, but that doesn't change my point much) including newlines and even newlines followed by `\` (with the newline extension, of course).
For a cell containing `cell<newline>\`, you'd have:
|cell<tab>|
\\<tab >|
(where `<tab >` represents a single tab character regardless of the number of spaces)
Moreover, if you really needed it, you could add another extension to specify tabs or pipes at the end of cells. For a POC, two cells with contents `a<tab>|` and `b<tab>|` could be represented as:
|a<tab ><tab>|b
~tab pipe<tab>|tab pipe
(with literal words "tab" and "pipe"). Something nicer might also be possible.
*Update:* Though, if the focus is on humans reading it, it might also make sense to allow a single row of the table to wrap and span multiple lines in the file, perhaps as another extension.
For multiline cell contents, there is rule 7, the multi line extension. Newlines are not allowed in cells otherwise, because of rule 2, it's a line based format.
I personally use it to write tabular data manually, used to define our datamodel. Because this format is editor agnostic, colleagues can easily read and edit as well. So in my case it's focus on human read/write and machine read.
I don't think popularizing these ASCII characters would solve the problem in its entirety.
If RS and US were in common use, there would be a need to have a visible representation for them in the terminal, and a way to enter RS on the keyboard. Pretty soon, strings that contain RS would become much more common in the wild.
Then, one day somebody would need to store one of those strings in a table, and there would be no way to do so without escaping.
I do think that having RS display in the terminal (like a newline followed by some graphic?) and using it would be an improvement over TSV's use of newline for this purpose, but considering that it's not a perfect solution, I can understand why people are not overly motivated to make this happen. The time for this may have been 40+ years ago when a standard for how to display or type it would be feasible to agree upon.
> Both already possible, they have official symbols representing them.
I'm not sure what you mean. For an illustration, my terminal does not print anything for them.
$ printf "qq\36\37text\n"
qqtext
*Update/Aside:* "My terminal", in this case, was `tmux`. Ghostty, OTOH, prints spaces instead of RS or US.
Unicode does have some symbols for every non-printable ASCII character, which you can see as follows with https://github.com/sharkdp/bat (assuming your font has the right characters, which it probably does):
$ printf "qq\36\37text\n" | bat -A --decorations never
qq␞␟text␊
Yes, I did mean the ␞ U+241E unicode symbols that represent separators. And as your `| bat` example shows, they can also be displayed in the terminal.
If you meant the default should always be symbolic, not sure, like newline separator isn't displayed in the terminal as a symbol, but maybe that's just a matter of extra terminal config
I'm my mind, gene expression is at least as important as the coding genome.
AFAIU, the later mostly encodes the structure of proteins, which naively are the factory machines of or cells (enzymes, that is) and some of its building blocks. The gene expression tells the factory what to produce (a tail or an ear, say), when to produce it, and how much. More relevant to the topic of this article, the gene expression would determine which structures and pathways of the brains (or adrenal glands, or any other organs) to suppress, and which to reinforce and build up in a new generation of humans.
The building blocks are important, but once they are good enough, it matters more what you choose to build with them.
Perhaps what the grandparent meant is that we have little clue to how exactly any particular change in non-coding DNA actually affects the functioning of our minds and bodies, we have few tools to study that beyond the seemingly obvious fact that it does have to encode the structure of all the organs of our body and the fundamental structure of our brains somehow.
And if we do get an all-powerful dictator, we will be screwed regardless of whether their governing intelligence is artificial or composed of a group of humans or of one human (with, say, powerful AIs serving them faithfully, or access to some other technology).