[~ot] why is programming so fun?

[Chris Wright]

Yigal Chripun wrote:
> Chris Wright wrote:
>> Yigal Chripun wrote:
>>> you have your view of the world which you think is absolute based on
>>> your seemingly very strong faith and therefore anything I say must be
>>> wrong. and that's based on:
>>> "the nth-hand re-interpretations of m-times "translated" stories related
>>> by /man/, and attributed to the will, actions or purpose of a god" as
>>> "Me Here" put so accurately in his post.
>> <pedantry style="misplaced">
>> Nitpick: the pronunciation of 'man' is /m&n/, not /man/, assuming you're
>> using CXS ( http://www.theiling.de/ipa/ ); it's /m{n/ in regular X-SAMPA
>> ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-SAMPA ).
>> </pedantry>
> 
> I do not understand any of the above signs of pronunciation and
> unfortunately do not have the time to investigate the provided wikipedia
> link. If I understand your point correctly you wanted to say:
> "man => men", right?
> anyway, I merely quoted the very well phrased snippet.

It was a bad joke, one that only linguists would get.

When describing how something sounds, linguists use an unambiguous 
alphabet; but there are two ways of describing it: essentially what the 
speaker thinks they're trying to say, and what they actually sound like.

To distinguish the two, the former is put in between slashes like 
/this/, and the latter is put between pipes like |this|.