A little disappointed so far

Ville Vainio vvainio at tp.spt.fi
Mon May 19 03:06:20 EDT 2003


aahz at pythoncraft.com (Aahz) wrote in message news:<ba9b2m$6mj$1 at panix3.panix.com>...


> But yes, for quick'n'dirty shell scripts, Perl will always beat Python.

How come? I feel that scripts can be written quicker in Python, one of
the reasons being that exception handling means you don't have to
check for errors. Perl script might have less characters, but it's
mostly punctuation which is slower to type anyway. And if you want to
get real dirty, you can always go with sh.

> Don't use TAB chars and set your width to four spaces.

Amen to that. If tabs raised some kind of warning, people would avoid
them from the start and wouldn't get the false impression that
whitespace block structure in Python is in some way "fragile". That
way ppl would immediately see that their editor setting are broken,
and would change them immediately before doing more work with it.

But this is an old flamewar, and should not be started again. It's
just sad that time after time, newbies will be burned by it.




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