[Tutor] the fivefold path

[Avi Gross]

Mark,

Thanks for the expansion.

Yes, there are ever more ways to format text.

There can be an indefinite expansion beyond this is many ways.

I was thinking of ways to make bits and pieces from objects and stringing them together, perhaps inventing your own methods.

Anyone can come up with another meta-language, perhaps embed them in a module with classes, and use overloading methods to make it easier to use.

But worst of all is to simply find an external application and open up a connection to it such as with Popen() or a call to a URL that accepts some formatting string and returns something formatted.

Consider something like a UNIX Shell language like sh/csh/ksh or more modern incarnations like BASH that use a dollar sign in imaginative ways such as $PATH or `command args` to make substitutions. You can imagine invoking something like that while passing along parts needed and taking back the result. 

Now, arguably, those are not part of the language. But if you want to build a weird enough scenario, you could have a Rube Goldberg device that bounced around multiple servers on the internet running many kinds of OS and percolated some complex result back into a now formatted string. 

Diversity is nice but also often a distraction. Worse is when trying to read what others have written. On that topic, I note many people like to include short segments in their ENGLISH writing from other languages. Latin and French are common inserts as they are easy to read albeit not always to comprehend. Lawyers seem unable to communicate without lots of Latin nonsense and some musicians must toss in periodic tidbits of Italian and so on. Languages that use characters totally outside what is in the character sets In English or near relatives that have added characters with diacritical marks, are less often seen. How often do you see Greek or Hebrew? OK, I admit I see them often, but my reading tastes are eclectic. I bet many would at least like a translation and/or transliteration next to such quotes or just the translation.

Back to programming. Nothing wrong with multiple ways if they offer more functionality that is useful 
But why constantly reinvent the wheel as an ellipse? Look at the issue of strings. There actually is a reason for the many variation in python. Single and double quotes are pretty much identical with the exception that they make it easier to include the other symbol without backslashes. Triple quotes (three doubles) offer other improvements and so do several raw or Unicode variants. But strictly speaking, they are often more syntactic sugar for one or a few underlying storage mechanisms accompanied by access methods. Objects, of a sort. The f version mentioned as a formatting method is in a sense another such object with additional methods. You can well imagine more such things you can design into a language, albeit some may not be able to use existing symbols you ran out of unless you want to use "'"'" stuff "'"'" (where you may not be able to read the nested " and ' and " and ' and " to have some exotic meaning like format the sting repeatedly in a loop till it does not change. For example, if $PATH evaluated to 

something${DATE}something`echo "hello \$world!"`something

and $DATE expanded to $MONTH/$DAY/$YEAR

then repeated formatting till no more expansions happen could be another type of string. No, not asking for that especially since I can see easy ways to make infinite loops 😊

Mark, perhaps jokingly, asks what can you do for your language. Nice sentiment but I find it less useful to be wedded or loyal to things as it is always more interesting to see if something new developed is at least as interesting. Many ideas when carried through to the point of absurdity stop being as useful. I am thinking of some LISP variants with very nice mathematical/philosophical ideas including how an amazing number of things can be done recursively. So if you asked them to write a function in lisp that compares A and B, they don't bother putting the numbers in two registers like A and B and issuing a compare directive at machine language level. Instead, they write the LISP equivalent of this pseudocode:

Greater(A,B)
If A == 0, return FALSE
If B == 0, return TRUE
Otherwise, return Greater(A-1, B-1)

Try comparing A,B = 999,999,999,999, 1,000,000,000,000
How much memory does your computer have? The numbers are ONE apart with A being smaller. But the algorithm slavishly puts recursive function calls on the stack about a trillion times then unwinds. You say no problem, tail recursion allows replacing the function on the stack. Maybe. So all you need is a trillion times the CPU time or so for something done in a few cycles in most hardware.
(((((Parenthetically, I am not picking on LISP), as most modern) (computer languages)) allow (((equivalent)) code. )))

Half the fun when I thought LISP was having people get lost counting parentheses at a time that editors did not easily tell you what matched what.

But keeping track of multiple threads in a GUI can be a modern version of nested complexity. 

I used to observe the Obfuscated C contests years ago. Anyone for obfuscated python. Well, not here in the tutor group.

https://www.ioccc.org/
http://wiki.c2.com/?ObfuscatedPython

I have played in the past with tricks to write code mostly in a language like Hungarian using a pre-processor that flipped the key words back into the usual English style and of course used variable names in yet other languages like transliterated Aramaic. Hard to find people who could even figure out what the program did. Throw that into a language like Python where you can create classes and overload operators and it can get to look like an Abbot and Costello routine.

But if you want clear, self-documenting, code, I prefer that.

Time to get back to normal questions on this forum?

-----Original Message-----
From: Tutor <tutor-bounces+avigross=verizon.net at python.org> On Behalf Of Mark Lawrence
Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2018 3:45 PM
To: tutor at python.org
Subject: Re: [Tutor] Pythonic way

On 20/11/2018 18:08, Avi Gross wrote:

> 
> We have two completely separate ways to format strings that end up 
> with fairly similar functionality. Actually, there is an implicit 
> third way 😊
> 

You could argue five ways :-)

1. C printf style formatting
https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#printf-style-string-formatting
2. New style string formatting
https://docs.python.org/3/library/string.html#string-formatting
3. f-strings
https://docs.python.org/3/reference/lexical_analysis.html#f-strings
4. String templates
https://docs.python.org/3/library/string.html#template-strings
5. String methods
https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#string-methods

Any advance on five anybody?

--
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence

_______________________________________________
Tutor maillist  -  Tutor at python.org
To unsubscribe or change subscription options:
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor