Help: Python for a big commercial project?

[Boudewijn Rempt]

Cameron Laird wrote:

> Let me reinforce this message.
> 
> Python is indeed "not very good at low-level character
> manipulation" (and other operations) *in "typical C-style"*.

I'll deinforce it :-). I recently had occasion to write a
couple of scripts to convert my novel from it's usenet-style
markup to latex or html, and I copied Knode's usenet-markup
parser to Python. (I was pretty feverish at that time and not
able to think coherently. That's why I was coding instead of
writing.)

Anyway, this is a plain silly loop over every character in the 
input files, like:

          s = f.read()
        i = 1

        while i < len(s):
            c = s[i]
            if c == "<": # Comments are ignored
                while c != ">":
                    i+=1
                    c=s[i]

            elif c == "-":
                if s[i+1] == "-" and s[i+2] != "-":
                    # mdash
          ...

But it still only takes 8 seconds to parse half a million
characters, which is pretty good going. I don't feel I will
have to do the rewrite I promised myself. After all, I'm
at 80% of the intended verbiage.

-- 
Boudewijn Rempt | http://www.valdyas.org