Python 1.6 The balanced language

[Quinn Dunkan]

On Thu, 31 Aug 2000 04:44:45 GMT, lobozc at my-deja.com <lobozc at my-deja.com>
wrote:
>3) My particular favourite is Icon (see www.cs.arizona.edu/icon).
>Particular aspects of some interest to Python would be goal-directed
>evaluation [saves helluva lot of lines of code...] and, less
>importantly, generators and coexpressions. I have no idea how difficult
>it would be to move these ideas to Python. But I (and many other
>people) can vouch that these mechanisms are very effective in writing
>very 'large' programs in a surprisingly small number of lines. I must
>stress here that this happens not the way Perl does it - but rather
>like in functional languages. That is: because of the built in
>mechanisms of evaluation. So it is readable :-), not just terse.

Well, with stackless we get continuations, which can be used to build things
like generators, coroutines, and backtracking.  They still won't be 'built in'
like they are in icon, but python has an evaluation mechanism :)  Of course,
who knows if stackless will get the nod, but lotsa people like it, so maybe
maybe...

In any case (as Tim pointed out a while back when I was making haskell
noises), python classes can already do a lot.  For instance, generators and
backtracking can often be obviated with a lazy list: just return a list of
successes or empty list for failure.  And a lazy list can be built with a
python class (although python's lack of lexical scoping can make thunking
harder... ouch :)