What does Python fix?

Courageous jkraska at san.rr.com
Sat Sep 28 21:42:40 EDT 2002


>Let's not forget that Python's syntax (most of all the significance of
>whitespace) is considered strange at least by about all novices. In
>both cases - significant whitespace and lots of irritating superflous
>parentheses - people don't just get used to it, but tend to like it
>after a while.

I'm fairly sure that you meant to say "Lisp" where you said Python,
right?

>Another rather cool feature of lisp that python lacks are macros, btw,
>or in general the uniform handling of code and data.

True. I was doing some experimentation on hygenic macros for Python
a while back, doing parse-tree time insertions. Never finished.

>That would be nice. The one thing lisp lacks is a huge community,
>manifesting itself in lots of ready-to-use libraries, tutorials etc.

This is actually on the top 3 list of its biggest weaknesses.

It doesn't help that the number of big commercial Lisp compilers
can be counted on the fingers of, err, one finger.

C//




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