Subject: Re: Sun thinks about switching Java to S-expression syntax: Lava From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1999/02/13 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3127870484360721@naggum.no> * joswig@lavielle.com (Rainer Joswig) | See the smiley in the body of the posting. maybe these smileys destroy communication? maybe they detract from the effort of being good at sarcasm, jokes, irony, or plain old lunacy. at one point in my life, I became acquainted with the habit of thinking that lying was OK if you held two fingers crossed behind your back. I couldn't figure out why this was important to people. if I lied, it was to protect something much more important than whoever I lied to, not to play stupid tricks on people. I could play much better tricks on people by making them believe something that would hurt them without my actually telling them anything for which they could directly fault me. it has since been a puzzling experience to see people fool _themselves_ so thoroughly that if you told them the truth, they think you're lying. "I have never had a sexual relationship with that women, Miss Lewinsky." did you see his hands? could he have crossed his fingers or made some other secret gesture by which he meant "the laugh's on you, buster"? and then it got out of hand because "I was only kidding" didn't work with the kid-me-not Kenneth Starr. maybe all the Democrats were in on it and the moralistic Republicans will be laughed out of politics? that'd be cool. meanwhile, there's not a single smiley on Kenneth Starr's pornographic report, either, not even the smirk you'd expect from someone digging up so much personal dirt about others. I think he forgot to include it: "There is Substantial and Credible Information that President Clinton Committed Acts that May Constitute Grounds for an Impeachment :>" #:Erik