NoneType List

[pallavi Kannor]

Thanks a lot all for your suggestions, I am clear now.


On Mon, Jan 2, 2023 at 10:50 AM <avi.e.gross at gmail.com> wrote:

> Not to wax poetic about our pasts, Thomas, but I do did not start with
> PASCAL and used quite a few languages before and plenty after. At the time
> it had interesting contrasts to languages like BASIC, FORTRAN and LISP and
> I
> tended to use whatever was available on the machines I was using. My first
> computer job (other than in grad school itself) was using OMSI PASCAL. I
> even wrote my thesis as a PASCAL program containing comments that included
> typesetting instructions in a language called RUNOFF while the PASCAL
> program itself was a set of comments as far as RUNOFF was concerned. So it
> compiled or was typeset and printed from the same source.
>
>  But my next job after graduation was for Bell Labs and I had to forget all
> the mainframe or DEC systems and adapt to UNIX, and of course C and later
> C++ and the various other little languages that came with that such as AWK
> and PERL ...
>
> There is no one right language but there often is a small set of right
> languages given your circumstances, such as what your employer has everyone
> using and especially in group projects.
>
> To be fair, languages like Python and R seem to keep having parts rewritten
> in C or C++ to make some things run faster and can include libraries
> written
> ages ago in languages like FORTRAN that have been finely tuned. Under the
> hood, these languages often hide parts so that developing a new python (or
> R
> or ...) module/package can start by writing it all in that language and
> then
> taking some functionality and rewriting it in the other language for
> critical regions where a slower interpreted method may be speeded up.
>
> But for prototyping, or when speed is not a big deal, I really prefer
> Python
> to ...
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Python-list <python-list-bounces+avi.e.gross=gmail.com at python.org>
> On
> Behalf Of Thomas Passin
> Sent: Sunday, January 1, 2023 10:15 PM
> To: python-list at python.org
> Subject: Re: NoneType List
>
> On 1/1/2023 9:14 PM, avi.e.gross at gmail.com wrote:
> > Thomas,
> >
> > I used PASCAL before C and I felt like I was wearing a straitjacket at
> > times in PASCAL when I was trying to write encryption/decryption
> > functions and had to find ways to fiddle with bits. Similar things
> > were easy in C, and are even easier in many more recent languages such
> > as Python.
>
> PASCAL was not the first language I learned.  I won't pretend I had to do
> anything very complicated, or do much bit-twiddling.  It was, though, the
> first one (except probably for FORTH) I enjoyed programming with more than
> I
> disliked the boiler-plate formalities.
>
> > The distinction between teaching a first language, or one that is so
> > cautious as to catch and prevent all mistakes it can, is not for
> > people willing to be bolder or work faster or write routines that can
> > be used more generally.
> >
> > What has not been mentioned is that languages like python go a step
> > further and allow a function to return many arguments and even a
> > varying number of arguments, as well as none at all. To do anything
> > like that in PASCAL
>
> (or C, for that matter)
>
> > took some thought on how to make some structure you could fill out
> > then return as a single value that the receiving code had to sort of
> > decode and perhaps deal with parts that could hold a union of several
> > things. Can a compiler or interpreter easily verify you did something
> > reasonable, as compared to say python that allows something like:
> >
> > (res1, res2, _, res4, _, rest) = f(x)
>
> Yes, that's one of the good things about Python, how it makes working with
> tuples so easy and natural.  OTOH, harking back to PASCAL for a minute, it
> had enumerations and sets long before Python got them.
>
> > The above tells the interpreter you expect perhaps 6 or more results
> > and what to do with them.
> >
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message----- From: Python-list
> > <python-list-bounces+avi.e.gross=gmail.com at python.org> On Behalf Of
> > Thomas Passin Sent: Sunday, January 1, 2023 1:03 PM To:
> > python-list at python.org Subject: Re: NoneType List
> >
> > On 1/1/2023 8:47 AM, Stefan Ram wrote:
> >> Thomas Passin <list1 at tompassin.net> writes:
> >>> Guido had been working on the ABC language for some years before he
> >>> developed Python.  ABC was intended mainly as a teaching and
> >>> prototyping language.
> >>
> >> In those days, there used to be a language called "Pascal". Pascal
> >> had a dichotomy between "functions" and "procedures". A call to a
> >> function was intended to have a value. A call to a procedure was
> >> intended to have an effect.
> >
> > Wirth developed Pascal as a teaching language. IIRC, originally it was
> > taught to students before there were any implementations. I did most
> > of my programming with Turbo Pascal for many years.  Just to clarify
> > what you wrote above, in Pascal a "procedure" does not return anything
> > while a "function" does.
> >
> > I really liked (Turbo) Pascal and I hated C back then.  No wonder I
> > like Python so much.  It must be something about how my mind works.
> >
> >> For some beginners, the difference between a value and and effect can
> >> be hard to grasp. So, Pascal's distinction helps to hammer that home.
> >>
> >> Experienced programmers know the difference and do no longer require
> >> the effort of the language to teach it to them.
> >>
> >> The time when someone is a beginner and still struggles to understand
> >> the difference between values and effects usually is significantly
> >> shorter than the later time where he has understood it and is
> >> programming productively, so it might be better when the language is
> >> adapted to people who already have understood the difference.
> >>
> >>
> >
> > -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
> >
>
> --
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>
> --
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>