Python isn't English -- and that's a good thing!

[miller.paul.w at gmail.com]

On May 13, 6:14 pm, MRAB <goo... at mrabarnett.plus.com> wrote:
> On May 13, 6:32 pm, "D'Arcy J.M. Cain" <da... at druid.net> wrote:

> I once had to do a bit of scripting in AppleScript. The problem I
> found was that AppleScript tries to be so much like natural English
> that I never got a clear idea of whether something would be valid!

You have a great point here.

I recently read a blog posting that noted the same thing about Inform
7 (a specialized language used to write interactive fiction games) and
its English-like syntax.  I've read completed games in Inform 7, and
they're very easy to understand, indeed.  It does tend to read like
English, though somewhat stilted/formal/artificial.

Writing it, on the other hand (at least according to to said blog
post), is a bit more difficult.  Because the syntax is *so* English-
like, one tends to want to write things that would be natural in
English.  However, because the compiler doesn't actually understand
natural English, this frequently doesn't work.

Python, OTOH, definitely *doesn't* have this sort of impedance
mismatch for me.  Python code looks like *code*, to be sure, but the
language allows you to forget about most of the nitty-gritty details
and just get stuff done.  That's what I like about it -- *not* that
it's "English-like," in any way.