[Tutor] question

[alan.gauld@bt.com]

> I just wanted to ask you guys a question, I recently tried 
> out Visual Basic 6.0 at a friends house, and I was amazed at 
> how easy things are to do with the making of the GUI 
> interface to programs, 

Yep, VB is king at quick GUI building. (Actually Delphi is pretty 
good too). VB is less good when you get to writing the code that 
does the work - you can do it but it tends to be quite verbose.

There are some GUI builders for doing GUIs in Python too.
BlackAdder, Glade, SpecTCL and KOMODO all do visual GUI 
building. But the VB environment is one of the fastest 
and easiest to use without doubt.

> off learning visual basic good and then coming back to python 

The opposite is better. Python forces you down good programming 
habits. Those habits can be used in VB but the language does 
nothing to stop you using bad habits. Bad habits once learnt 
are hard to break!

VB is definitely worth knowing tho' if only because it's the 
natural scripting language for Microsoft products. There are 
also lots of VB jobs around!

> I have tried to read the docs on how to compile with python 

Why do you believe you need to compile with Python?
VB up until V5 couldn't "compile" either. It didn't harm its 
acceptance, people just got used to having ~1Mb DLL and ocx files
on the PC to run their VB programs. (try searching your PC for 
VBRUN*.DLL  and *.ocx to see how many you have and how much 
space they take up! You'll almost certainly find at least one 
VBRUN and loads of ocxs - about 20Mb worth on my machine)) 
Once you get Python installed the programs run fast enough for 
most things just as they are.

Alan G.