no string.downer() ?

Grant Edwards wrote:

> Not only does one need to be familiar with English, but one
> also has to be familiar with somewhat obscure terms dervied
> from ancient typsetting practices. In other contexts, downer is
> definitely the obvious converse of upper.

Nonsense. Down is the opposite of up, but lower is the opposite of upper
as an adjective: upper level, lower level; upper class, lower class,
upper case, lower case, upper rank, lower rank, upper lip, lower lip;
upper arm, lower arm; upper leg, lower leg; upper house, lower house (of
a legislature); upper layer, lower layer; Upper Paleolithic, Lower
Paleolithic (and so on for other geologic periods; upper Manhattan,
lower Manhattan (and so on for other persiods); upper Mississippi, lower
Mississippi (and so on for other rivers).

Downer, a noun, opposes upper only when upper is used as a noun for
depressing versus stimulating things, most often with reference to drugs
It is also used to refer to animals that are so sick that they cannot
stand up or otherwise need to be 'put down' (permanently). But healthy
animals are not called uppers that I know of.

tjr

On Aug 28, 11:34 am, John Machin <sjmac...@lexicon.net> wrote:
> On Aug 28, 11:25 am, Asun Friere <afri...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > On Aug 28, 10:28 am, John Machin <sjmac...@lexicon.net> wrote:
>
> > > Out of the possible diagnoses (trolling, incredible stupidity, feeble
> > > joke attempt) of the cause of the ensuing upper/downer question, I'm
> > > going with the third.
>
> > Never ascribe to humour that which can be adequately explained by
> > increadible stupidity! On the other hand given up/down vs. high/low,
> > upper/downer might appear logical to someone who doesn't know that
> > "downcase" is called 'lowercase.'
>
> He knows that s.upper().swapcase() does the job, without having read
> the swapcase docs where it is screamingly obvious that lowercase is
> the antonym of uppercase???

:shrugs, Why not? One does a dir() on one's string and sees 'upper'
and 'swapcase' (but fails to see or understand 'lower'), and takes an
educated guess at what they do. In any case that was only a caveat to
the point I was trying to make, namely that you were probably being
too generous towards said poster.

Asun Friere wrote:

> Never ascribe to humour that which can be adequately explained by
> increadible stupidity! On the other hand given up/down vs. high/low,
> upper/downer might appear logical to someone who doesn't know that
> "downcase" is called 'lowercase.'

prior exposure to Ruby might explain this, right? (iirc, they use
"upcase" and "downcase").

</F>

> Never ascribe to humour that which can be adequately explained by
> increadible stupidity!

I love the irony. Don't feel bad. I recently corrected
someone's 'grammer' with a similar tone.
** Posted from http://www.teranews.com **

Tobiah wrote:

>> Never ascribe to humour that which can be adequately explained by
>> increadible stupidity!
>
> I love the irony.

Muphry's law.

</F>

En Thu, 28 Aug 2008 02:52:42 -0300, Fredrik Lundh <fredrik@pythonware.com>
escribi�:

> Asun Friere wrote:
>
>> Never ascribe to humour that which can be adequately explained by
>> increadible stupidity! On the other hand given up/down vs. high/low,
>> upper/downer might appear logical to someone who doesn't know that
>> "downcase" is called 'lowercase.'
>
> prior exposure to Ruby might explain this, right? (iirc, they use
> "upcase" and "downcase").

Yes. And Common Lisp has used the same very names for a longer time than
Python itself existed, so I don't agree with many comments on this thread.

--
Gabriel Genellina