The REALLY bad thing about Python lists ..

[Grant Griffin]

Garry Hodgson wrote:
> 
> Grant Griffin <g2 at seebelow.org> wrote:
> 
> > (BTW, why to you Unix people
> > separate your packager gizmo from your compression gizmo?  Very
> > strange...)
> 
> not strange at all.  these are two completely different
> functions, and thus belong in different programs.

Well, in the context of a 1970's-style command line OS, which
synthesizes complex behavior by stringing primitive commands together,
maybe so.  But surely it causes you people a lot of typing.  (Or maybe
you people write a shell script to mitigate that.)

But in the context of a modern GUI OS, it makes a lot more sense to have
all such functionality built into a single program.  I have never seen a
Windows equivalent of "tar" (that is, a packager, less compression), nor
have I ever wanted one: if you're packaging, you might as well compress;
if you're doing both, they might as well both be in the same program.

Perhaps the '70s approach saved a little disk space or whatever by not
repeating tar's functionality in each compression program, but clearly
that isn't worth the extra trouble it causes for users to have to
repeatedly invoke tar every time they want to de-compresss a package.

> it is the same reason people use functions and classes in
> their programs, rather than:
> 
> main()
> {
>         ...80000 lines of code omitted...
> }
> 
> (and yes, i've seen programs like that.)

Me too.  But they seem to be written mostly by people who would rather
write shell scripts than use do-it-all GUI programs. ;-)

sane-people-must-seem-crazy-to-the-insane-<two winks>-ly y'rs,

=g2
-- 
_____________________________________________________________________

Grant R. Griffin                                       g2 at dspguru.com
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