From owner-freebsd-chat Tue Oct 30 8:40:39 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-65-31-203-60.mmcable.com [65.31.203.60]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 9CD3F37B403 for ; Tue, 30 Oct 2001 08:39:27 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 61534 invoked by uid 100); 30 Oct 2001 16:39:21 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15326.55225.430968.40694@guru.mired.org> Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2001 10:39:21 -0600 To: Robert Clark Cc: John Baldwin , Terry Lambert , Jordan Hubbard , Poul-Henning Kamp , chat@FreeBSD.ORG, Nate Williams Subject: Re: time_t not to change size on x86 In-Reply-To: <20011030081253.D36195@darkstar.gte.net> References: <3BDE6ED3.64DC027E@mindspring.com> <20011030081253.D36195@darkstar.gte.net> X-Mailer: VM 6.90 under 21.1 (patch 14) "Cuyahoga Valley" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Robert Clark 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. http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Q: How do you make the gods laugh? A: Tell them your plans. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message