Python's "only one way to do it" philosophy isn't good?

[Terry Reedy]

"Cousin Stanley" <cousinstanley at hotmail.com> wrote in message 
news:1181385768_30305 at sp12lax.superfeed.net...
| > In scheme, I believe you just have recursion.

I was referring to the original mimimalist core language developed by Guy 
and Sussman and as I remember it being used in the original edition of SICP 
(see Wikipedia).  I also remember statements explaining (truthfully) that 
builtin iteration is not needed because it can be defined in terms of tail 
recursion, which in Scheme is required to be optimized to be just as space 
efficient.

I see in Wikipedia that Scheme has do loops (all versions?), but I do not 
know if that was original or added.  If the former, it was de-emphasized. 
Hence my belief, even if mistaken.

| Cousin TJR ....
|
|  I'm a total scheme rookie starting only about 3 days ago
|  and one of the mechanisms I went looking for was a technique
|  for iteration ....
|
|  Found in the scheme docs about iteration supplied
|  via the  reduce  package ....

Right.  An add-on library package, not part of the core;-)

In Python, modules can add functions (and classes, etc), but not statement 
syntax, so adding while statements defined in terms of recursion is not 
possible.

Scheme is quite elegant and worth learning at least the basics of.  My only 
point was that Sussman is an odd person to be criticizing (somewhat 
mistakingly) Python for being minimalist.

tjr