Re: Announcing new scripting/prototyping language

From: Warren W. Gay VE3WWG (warren_at_ve3wwg.tk)
Date: 02/09/04 

Date: Mon, 09 Feb 2004 13:11:55 -0500

Y2KYZFR1 wrote:

> Joona I Palaste <palaste@cc.helsinki.fi> wrote in message news:<bvvjqj$4fb$1@oravannahka.helsinki.fi>...
>>Richard Heathfield <dontmail@address.co.uk.invalid> scribbled the following
>>on comp.lang.c:
>>>Larry Hazel wrote:
>>>>Christopher Benson-Manica wrote:
...
> you have obviously never even seen a Python program, since it does not
> use any punction marks. It ( and Lua ) are about as close to
> executable pseudo-code as you can get. Python ( and Lua ) is
> "comprehendable" by anyone that can read english for the most part. C
> and C++ are not.
>
> Python enforces rules about formatting even, so everyones Python code
> HAS to conform to the same formatting rules, thus contributing to even
> more "readibility"

IMHO, Python made a mistake there. Rather than dictate
the input format, they should have accepted a variety
of freeform input, but instead provided a pretty print
capability to produce "conforming format". This way,
the person/editor combination is not punished for doing
things a bit different. I do believe that a uniform
format is nice: but take freeform input, and produce
the rigid format as output. Ie. let the machines do
the work ;-)

In the past, _some_ BASIC interpreters worked this way.
It was forgiving about the format upon entry, but when
you listed it, the format was converted from tokens back
to ASCII in a uniform and consistent manner.

Just my 0.02 worth in this now academic post ;-) 

-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://ve3wwg.tk

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