Python advocacy

[Cary O'Brien]

In article <EFA8C08D6905AA97.1DD527E852A8639F.6F01C42E2CE7BC5B at lp.airnews.net>,
Cameron Laird <claird at starbase.neosoft.com> wrote:
>In article <38C57EB8.882AE093 at prescod.net>,
>Paul Prescod  <paul at prescod.net> wrote:
>			.
[snip java stuff]
>
>Tcl's [exec] (think popen()) is neater than
>people realize; it does a *lot* for a developer.
>That's just a library issue, of course.
>
>Certain Tcl extensions are champs:  Tk, Expect,
>and Scotty are the most prominent.  What that
>says about the *language* is a complex story
>(and a different one in each case--sometime I'll
>tell the unabridged versions).
>

One reason that these extensions are so great is
the event model.  Well, the right way would be
to say that Tk forced Tcl to operate in an event-driven
manner, and this allows things like fileevent and
Scotty to be so slick.

I'm doing a little Python (via Zope) and the thing
I miss the most is the tcl event model.

>I think I still could make a weak but definite
>argument that Tcl is better as an extension
>language--that is, for facilitating the under-ten-
>line scripts that are a matter of indifference
>to you.
>

One reason that Tcl seems better as an extension
language, no two, reasons...

1) Documentation, including The Good Doctor Ousterhout's
   book.

2) The *old* calling sequence looked kinda like
   c main(), i.e. you get (after Client Data and interp) 
   an argc/argv list.  So this is very familiar to C 
   programmers.  Of course with the new object layer
   this changes.

-- cary


>Python's a better language than Visual Basic.
>It's not worth arguing about.
>			.
Never touched VB.
>			.
>			.
>-- 
>
>Cameron Laird <claird at NeoSoft.com>
>Business:  http://www.Phaseit.net
>Personal:  http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/home.html