[Edu-sig] Goofing with Groups

Guido van Rossum guido@digicool.com
Fri, 26 Jan 2001 22:28:23 -0500


> SETL was developed in the late 1960s and early 70s, and like several
> languages developed then, is still decades ahead of its time <0.9
> wink>.

At this point (i.e. whenever SETL is mentioned :-) I insert something
like this into the message stream: Python's roots were influenced
(indirectly) by SETL.  Remember that Python was derived from ABC.
Lambert Meertens, ABC's main designer, spent a sabbatical year in New
York City working with some SETL folks.  (I believe the same folks who
wrote the first validated Ada compiler -- in SETL.  It took forever to
compile "hello world", but it was the first compiler that received DoD
validation.  So there.)  Anyway, Meertens was inspired by some of
SETL's data structures, and claims to have written a SETL program that
helped him evaluate the effectiveness of various combinations of
primitive data structures, to come up with the ideal set of primitive
data structures for ABC.  I guess the program proved that sorted lists
plus sorted dictionaries could do anything, when combined with
numbers, strings and fixed-size tuples.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)