The REALLY bad thing about Python lists ..

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

"Tim Peters" <tim_one at email.msn.com> writes:

> [Tim]
> >> ISO/ANSI C doesn't fully define what happens when (roughly)
> >> integer division or % are handed negative numbers.
> 
> [Glyph Lefkowitz]
> > The foibles of standards commitees will never cease to amuse me.
> > Thank you for this little tidbit.
> 
> The next iteration of C has threatened to "fix" this, by mandating Fortran's
> original mistake (truncation, as opposed to Python's floor).

By "threatened" you don't mean "already mandated but it hasn't been
implemented yet", do you?  Please say this is still open for
discussion :-)

> BTW, have you "served" on a stds committee?  It's, umm, educational.

[ comittee-nonsense snipped ]

Wow.  Come see the ANSI Standards Comittees perform "USENET, live and
in concert!"... although the anecdotes I've heard about the Common
Lisp and ANSI C standards committees jibe with this altogether too
much :-\

> > Do you actually have a basis for that statistic?
> 
> The only *hard* statistic Guido has is the download stats from
> python.org, where the number of Windows downloads routinely beats
> the number of all others combined (last stats I saw were from last
> August, where Windows was "winning" by an easy factor of 2)

Well, speaking of lame anecdotes, :), now that I'm writing software in
python, this is the way my conversations go with potential users:

Me - "I've got some more of the code done.  Do you guys want to try it out?"
Linux User - "Sure.  Do I need python installed?"
Me - "Type 'python'.  Does anything happen?"
Linux User - "Yeah, a >>> prompt comes up."
Me - "OK, just download the software."
(5 minutes later)
Linux User - "Got the file; ... what do I do with it?"
Me - "On the command line, tar xvzf mysoftware.tar.gz, then cd mysoftware; ./run"
Linux User - "OK, it's running.  Thanks!"

Windows User - "What do I need?"
Me - "Well, first you'll need WinZip ... download it from www.winzip.com"
(20 minutes later)
Windows User - "OK installed.  What else do I need?"
Me - "You need Python: go to www.python.org, download it, and install it."
(20 minutes later)
Windows User - "Grr.  OK installed.  It asked me about tcl/tk but I didn't install that."
Me - "No, you need that.  Uninstall and then reinstall and install that too."
(5 minutes later)
Windows User - "Augh!  Done.  OK now what?"
Me - "Download mysoftware.zip, and double-click on it.  That should open up WinZip...."

(the windows user will almost always become frustrated at this point
and forget about it, being "just a user" and confused by all this
high-falutin terminology of "archives" and "virtual machines",
assuming that WinZip works at all.  I need to build a friggin'
installer soon so this stops happening.)

The point being, of course, more Linux users have tar than Windows
users have WinZip, and more Linux users have Python than Windows users
do; but I am sure that GNU tar is downloaded less than WinZip.

I have yet to encounter a Linux user (regardless of distribution) who
doesn't have python installed, although most don't know that it's
there.  Given how many really useful utilities are written in it, and
how many environments depend on it, it's becoming a basic component of
most modern linux distros.

> not-admitting-that-a-little-known-part-of-python-startup-sends-
>     email-to-python.org-whenever-python's-invoked-ly y'rs  - tim

putting-python-in-a-chroot-jail-with-no-network-access-
        from-now-on-(and-i'd-like-to-see-you-do-that-on
        -windows-<wink>)-ly y'rs,

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