No macros in Python

[Russell Wallace]

On Mon, 16 Dec 2002 14:56:37 +0100, Laura Creighton <lac at strakt.com>
wrote:

>Does it go down any better this way?  'The language designer does not 
>know better than I do, but he does know better than Laura Creighton, 
>aged 18, arrogant as Satan and whose code I am likely to maintain?'

But how would the 18 year old Laura ever have learned, except by
trying stuff out? ^.^ (I was arrogant as Satan at age 18 too, but I'd
never have learned anything if I hadn't had the opportunity to try
things my way and find out what worked and what didn't.)

>I don't have any lying around, but the problem was that every floor invented
>its own particular syntax for doing things like Discrete Fast Fourier 
>Transforms.

I still don't get this - how did it differ from every floor writing
their own FFT function with its own calling conventions etc in
Fortran?

>We made the code resemble the hardware,
>a lot, because we thought the hardware was cool. 

In what way? Were there any efficiency gains from doing that?

>By the time a department 
>of Physicists gets done with any language, in the 1970s at any rate, it all 
>looks like FORTRAN anyway.

I'd've thought they'd have no trouble reading it then - don't all
physicists learn Fortran as their first programming language? :)

>Lispers from the AI community who shared an
>office with me held their noses ....

When I used to write Lisp for AI, it tended to look like C. I'm sure
real Lispers would hold their noses at that too :)

-- 
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