Not fully OO ?

[Duncan Booth]

candide <candide at free.invalid> wrote:

> Excerpt quoted from http://www.astro.ufl.edu/~warner/prog/python.html :
> 
> "About Python: Python is a high level scripting language with object 
> oriented features.
> (...)
> Python supports OOP and classes to an extent, but is not a full OOP 
> language."
> 
> 
> Thanks for any comment.

General comments about the page:

Section 2: Poor demonstration of 'global'. The declaration of 'a' as global 
is unnecessary and misleading.

Section 4: "Maths: Requires import math"
The supplied examples won't work if you just "import math", they need a 
"from math import ..." (either * or better an explicit list of functions).

Worse, the random number examples won't work whatever you import as they 
include both 'random.seed()' which assumes 'random' is the module and 'x = 
random()' which requires 'from random import random'.

Section 5: "Strings do not expand escape sequences unless it is defined as 
a raw string by placing an r before the first quote"  What is that supposed 
to mean? Describing triple quoted strings as 'optional syntax' is a bit 
weird too: the syntax is no more optional than any other form of string 
literal, you can use it or not.

Another pointless example given under the heading 'String Operators':
    	Concatenation is done with the + operator.
    	Converting to numbers is done with the casting operations:
    	x = 1 + float(10.5)

"String functions" actually mostly describes string methods with "len" 
hidden in the middle but only the example tells you that it is different 
than the other examples.

Section 6 is all about numarray but bizarrely (for something purporting to 
be an overview of Python) there is nothing at all about either list or dict 
types.

Section 7 says "There is no switch or case statement so multiple elifs must 
be used instead." omitting to mention other possibly more appropriate 
options such as dicts or inheritance. This is a good indication that the 
author doesn't know much about OOP.

Section 8 "for x in array: statements" shows that the author doesn't 
understand things like iterators.

Section 10 has such interesting facts as "Only constant initializers for 
class variables are allowed (n = 1)" or "Objects can be compared using the 
== and != operators. Two objects are equal only if they are the same 
instance of the same object." and an example with a completely spurious 
class attributes, some pointless getter/setter methods, and contorted calls 
to base class methods.

Section 11 demonstrates again that the author doesn't understand about 
iterable objects.

I'd say the claim that Python isn't a full OOP language is not the most 
important reason to ignore the page.