Python version of IQ has been updates (IQ v0.34.python)

[Andrew Kuchling]

"Alex Martelli" <aleaxit at yahoo.com> writes:
> And where would that "elsewhere" be?  Once upon a time, you could
> perhaps count on "a real programmer" having a lot of experience
> with vi and/or emacs, lexx, grep, egrep, sed, awk -- today, while
> still widespread and flourishing, these tools are not mainstream.

A vestigial trace of this era shows up right at the beginning of the
Python tutorial, which starts "If you ever wrote a large shell script,
you probably know this feeling: you'd love to add yet another feature,
but it's already so slow, and so big, and so complicated; ..."  Today
I'm sure most people start with a general scripting language, and
don't bother with trying a shell script first.

> It's interesting that the two P-languages arrive at roughly
> similar power by such widely divergent paths.  Python's way

If you're familiar with Python's internals, it's also instructive to
look at http://gisle.aas.no/perl/illguts/, a description of Perl's
implementation.  You can see a likeness between the two
implementations, though Perl adds lots of specialized flags to objects
in an effort to squeeze out a cycle here or there, while Python just
says to hell with it and leaves the code straightforward and simple.
It's my understanding that part of the motivation of the Perl6 rewrite
is to drop a lot of the flags and special-casing, because on modern
processors the clever tricks don't actually help much, so Perl's
implementation will likely become more like Python's in this respect.

--amk