syntax difference

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Jun 18, 2018 at 10:22 AM, Jim Lee <jlee54 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 06/17/2018 02:17 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
>>
>> [snip]
>> My apologies, stuff wrapped and I misread as I skimmed back. You were
>> the one who used the word "shoehorned". In the same way, that sounds
>> like you already knew the language, and then someone added extra
>> features that don't fit. It's not shoehorning if the feature was
>> already there before you met the language.
>>
>> The point is the same, the citation incorrect. Mea culpa.
>>
>> ChrisA
>
>
> Of course it is "shoehorning".  Why do you care when I started using the
> language?  Shoehorning implies an attempt to add a feature that didn't exist
> in the original design - a feature that is a difficult, awkward, or
> ill-fitting complement to the original design.  Whether it happened
> yesterday or 12 years ago is immaterial.  When I personally met the language
> is also immaterial.
>
> Microsoft "shoehorned" a Linux subsystem into Windows.  I don't even use
> Windows, yet by your logic, I can't call it "shoehorning".

Or maybe that's an indication of a change in design goals. Python's
original goal was to be very similar to C, and thus had a lot of
behaviours copied from C; up until Python 2.2, the default 'int' type
would overflow if it exceeded a machine word. Were long integers
shoehorned into the design, or does it indicate that the design was
modified to welcome them?

Personally, I think the Linux subsystem is (a) no different from (but
converse to) Wine, and (b) a good stepping-stone towards a Windows
release using a Unix kernel.

ChrisA