Controlling an external program with Python

[Donn Cave]

Quoth claird at starbase.neosoft.com (Cameron Laird):
| In article <395B32D1.B926FDB3 at hursley.ibm.com>,
| Paul Duffin  <pduffin at hursley.ibm.com> wrote:
...
|> This sort of arrangement is only possible when people who are interested in
|> Expect functionality can transcend any language *issues*, by accepting that 
|> the language is basically irrelevant apart from the effect in may have on
|> the required functionality and work together.
...
| I believe I've heard Don express surprise at Expect's
| career.  He thought people would steal the ideas for
| other (languages') libraries.  What he least expected
| (sic), if I understand it correctly, was that the whole
| world would be content to invoke Expect as the standalone
| executable which we know utterly dominates its use.

Well, I'm surprised he's surprised!  Expect-Tcl works out
so well that it more or less cancels out the ``wrong language''
problem.  Mainly because Tcl (as I suppose Lisp/Scheme) can
support an "expect" statement in a way that doesn't fit in
Python (that I can think of - this is not a comment on the
existing Python expects, with which I am not familiar.)

And then I have looked at the source.  I'm sure it has no peer
when it comes to comprehensive cross-platform pseudotty support,
but a lot of barnacles come with that.  I would steal a younger
horse than this.

	Donn Cave, donn at u.washington.edu