>>>http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE5314B320090402
>>
>>Still waiting for the next article: 1 in n Americans on drugs...
>
>Where n (less than sign) 10 ... :(
>
>Now you can't put less than signs in UT messages unless they're wrapped in PREs. Very annoying. Lazy parsing, if you ask me.

That's the other American drug, which seems to have caught on elsewhere. A few idle busybodies complain about something that nobody else would, and create an illusion of a public feedback, even public outrage. And things change for everybody in honest attempt to please the public. Shows went off air for two old ladies who complained (and someone important, aka $$, who then backed the popular outrage threatening to withdraw his contribution aka ads).

As for UT's parsing of punctuation, I guess it would make sense to sanitize strings in areas available to outsiders. In the message area, it has never been a nightmare, but always a nuisance. We're programmers here, our text will definitely not conform to a regular grammar, simply by frequent mention of constructs from a programming language. We also do html, which means that UT will forever have the problem of distinction between text and metatext. Just like you can't have a line containing "ENDTEXT" anywhere in a text/endtext block (you can, but it will break), the appearance of many things that make metatext on the web inside our text creates problems here and there. I had the impression that Michel is maybe too responsive in some cases, but then I don't know what (and specially how many) people were writing to him.