Python complaints

[Gareth McCaughan]

Markus Stenberg wrote:

[I said:]
>>   - Some more iteration constructs would be nice.
>> 
>>       - do ... while
> 
> ugh. matter of taste I suppose, but I don't find that lack big deal.

The main reason I'd like to see it there is that I use
Python sometimes for teaching to (young -- 12-15-ish)
novices, and "while 1: ... break ..." is a little hard
to motivate.

>>       - parallel iteration across more than one list
> 
> for list1item, list2item, list3item in map(None, list1, list2, list3):
> 	print 'whee', list1item, list2item, list3item

Yeah, I know. But if I want that sort of thing I can use C. :-)

>>       - a less yucky way of saying "for i in range(1,20,3)"
> 
> see above - although some special syntactic sugar would be "nice", I prefer
> minimalistic approach over say, C.. of course, Dylan does it (IMNSHO)
> cleanest:
> 
> for (i from 3 to 19 by 3)
> 	...
> 	
> 
> Regrettably I can't tolerate Dylan's whitespace approach :P
> (I write accidentally too often stuff like i-j, as opposed to i - j)

Dylan is sort of nice. I can't think of any purpose for which
I'd prefer Dylan to Common Lisp, though; the strengths of the
two languages are in similar places, and I think CL wins.

-- 
Gareth McCaughan  Gareth.McCaughan at pobox.com
sig under construction