[Pythonmac-SIG] NSTableView and NSOutlineView backgrounds

[Jack Jansen]

On Tuesday, October 14, 2003, at 06:28 PM, Drew McCormack wrote:
>> The inspiration for this came from Evan Jones' implementation in
>> Objective-C, which is, of course, several times larger than the
>> code above, especially since it involves more than only this one
>> method:
> As an fan of Obj-C, I can't really let this go unanswered. There seems 
> quite a bit of animosity toward Obj-C from python programmers, and I 
> don't really understand why.

I think Dinu was just a bit overenthusiastic about Python here:-)

And I agree: ObjC is a pretty neat language. The merging of Smalltalk 
and C looks
pretty clunky at first sight, but if you see the amount of power they
packed into the language with only very few extensions to C it's 
impressive.

Compare that to C++ with its utterly baroque set of C extensions.... 
brrrr:-(

> Along these lines, has anyone ever 'hacked' the python interpreter to 
> do smalltalk like messaging, with segmented names? I've been tempted 
> to try it myself. You wouldn't think it would be that hard. Maybe just 
> an extra stage to convert segmented names to underscored ones, the 
> same way that PyObjC names methods. But I'm no python expert, so I 
> don't know what would be involved.

I've been thinking about it. And the nice thing is that "[" cannot 
currently
occur as the start symbol for an expression, and I think a NAME after an
expression is also safe, so adding rules like
	atom: '[' test methodarg* ']'
	methodarg: NAME ':' test
should work...

But getting Guido to incorporate this into the language is a different 
story:-)
--
Jack Jansen, <Jack.Jansen at cwi.nl>, http://www.cwi.nl/~jack
If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma 
Goldman