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Date:      Tue, 30 Oct 2001 10:39:21 -0600
From:      Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org>
To:        Robert Clark <res03db2@gte.net>
Cc:        John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.ORG>, Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>, Jordan Hubbard <jkh@winston.freebsd.org>, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG, Nate Williams <nate@yogotech.com>
Subject:   Re: time_t not to change size on x86
Message-ID:  <15326.55225.430968.40694@guru.mired.org>
In-Reply-To: <20011030081253.D36195@darkstar.gte.net>
References:  <3BDE6ED3.64DC027E@mindspring.com> <XFMail.011030073149.jhb@FreeBSD.org> <20011030081253.D36195@darkstar.gte.net>

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Robert Clark <res03db2@gte.net> types:
> I'm curious, have any of you tried python? What are your opinions?

I write in it regularly. It manages to be terse without being
unreadable. Some people are really put off by whitespace being
significant. If that puts you off and you want a more C-like syntax,
you might take a look at ruby.

When invoked with no arguments, it has a real REPL, and most classes
carry their documentation with them. It makes it possible to program
interactively. It's also been OO from day one, so you get more
leverage from that. On the other hand, you can't do even simple things
without having to know how to reference the attribute of an object.

Make no mistake - it's scripting language, not systems language. It's
slower than Java because it has no type checking. However, I like the
way it integrates with C (or Fortran, or Java) better, as it's
straightforward to create objects that are wrappers for your
C/Fortran/Whatever code and use them from Python.

All of which is part of why Python is popular in places that deal with
objects that have to do lots of number crunching. You wrap your
complex objects in Python, making the messy calculation methods, and
you can then play with them with simple scripts instead of having to
recompile fortran programs that invoke those functions. You can even
do it interactively.

> I could not get past the fact that if I wrote a program in Java,
> I couldn't say so anywhere. All the Sun legalese put me off.

When I did Java, I used the Python implemnted in Java as a test
harness. Compile my classes, run JPython, load my classes, create
instances and make sure they behaved as expected.

	<mike
--
Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Q: How do you make the gods laugh?		A: Tell them your plans.

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