Looking for Python programmers--where to search?

Alex Martelli aleaxit at yahoo.com
Tue Oct 3 10:31:35 EDT 2000


"gbp" <gpepice1 at nycap.rr.com> wrote in message
news:39D41227.4E7EC482 at nycap.rr.com...
>
> Pascal.
>
> My first real langauge was Pascal, from a class in high school.  It was
> during that class that I decided that I wanted to program for a living.
>
> I remeber the feeling of acomplishment at some of the things we made
> pascal do.  For example, we had to make a calculator to do unlimitedly
> large integer math.  In python I suspect you could do the same thing ten
> different ways, all easier.  But you wouldn't get that sense of taking a
> painful limit (integers can only go up to a certain size about 10 digits
> long) and eliminating it with nothing but the core syntax.

Unlimited-precision integers are part of core Python, so this specific
task would not make much sense there (although it could still be
proposed, just as, say, the task of programming the multiplication
of integers can be and is often proposed in Pascal courses).  But, of
course, there are many similar and equivalent tasks; the number of
things one potentially wants to do is unbounded, so no language will
ever have them all as built-ins.  For a closely parallel example,
consider unlimited-precision rational numbers (the easy part) and
a complement of trascendental functions on them able to work to
any runtime-specified precision (the harder part, if you want any
halfway-decent performance).


> Also, python's syntax is way to large.  A summary of pascal can fit on
> one page.  When I program in python I need reference material all the
> time.  I remeber just sitting down in front of a machine and coding in
> pascal.

Python's syntax is in fact _smaller_ than Pascal -- just count the
keywords!  The "reference material" you're probably thinking of is
about _libraries_ -- Standard Pascal has just about zilch of those,
so, of course, Python does have more (MANY more).  As for "just
sitting down and coding", that's what I found myself doing in Python
after about one week -- far faster than with any other language I
had ever tried (dozens and dozens of them...).  Unless I want to
use a library that I'm not very familiar with, "just sitting down and
coding" _is_ Python for me -- I start sketching my design in
pseudocode, as I would for any other language, except that when
my pseudocode-level design is done, so is my coding, because
Python IS executable pseudocode...!-)


Alex






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