Please see below ... > I'm getting a bit off topic, for which I apologize
I'll bring us back OT, at least initially, by quoting and responding to your points out of original order ... > I like the way GiA organizes and names files (except for that mildly annoying "((flashhd))" suffix), but find gip's way of organizing and naming them ugly. So I threw together a little Python script [...] Wouldn't it be easier just to use the --prefix option in GiP? The rest of this is OT and can be ignored by anyone not interested ... > it pained me to see Perl and Python tarred with the same brush. I've experience in all those languages except COBOL, including the ones you mention but don't claim experience in -- Pascal and BASIC Naturally I wouldn't've suggested them without experience of them. > plus FORTRAN, A very little. > Cray Assembler No experience. > 6502 Assembler, Hand assembled a monitor for a CBM/Pet 8096, until I could write an assembler for it. Ditto for an Amstrad CPC6128 (Z80). > and, heck, my very first coding was done in octal machine language on a very early IBM mini (even if they didn't call it that). Hex (as above). > Probably a few others that aren't coming to (increasingly feeble) mind. BATch, Kix, SQL, VBScript ... I too am getting forgetful! > I doubt there's anyone on the planet that would argue against your claim that Perl is ugly. While it's possible to write tolerably readable code in Perl, it is one of the ugliest, least readable languages ever, short of Whitespace. :) > Python, by stark contrast, is extremely clean and readable due to its use of semantically meaningful indentations. It has some major problems ... The first you have mentioned as an asset, but said semantically meaningful indentation has some disadvantages too - it is, AFAIAA, unique, and thus confuses programmers coming from other languages, and it is possible to be confused by spaces where the rest of the program has been written with tabs, and vice versa, and such problems can be non-obvious to spot, and further it is impossible to crunch, though I admit this latter problem can largely be offset by pre-compilation. Secondly, particularly to anyone used to more mainstream OOP languages such as C++ or Java, its object-oriented syntax is just horrible. I have to look it up anew every time I want to create an object. Thirdly, again particularly to anyone used to C or Java, its syntax for conditional assignment is uniquely weird, and always I have to check that I've remembered it aright. Fourthly, there is the confusion between when to use arrays, and when to use sequences, the confusion of syntax differences between the two, and the syntax to create arrays is uniquely obscure, to say the least. Fifthly, its documentation is poor, finding help on any of the above points may take some time. I dare say I could find more, but that'll do for an OT post for now ... > even novice programmers produce mostly readable code in Python, and seasoned programmers produce code I'd claim is even readable by smart non-programmers (though I've been programming for so long it's hard to fully understand that mindset). Well, it is certainly possible to produce something that works, and quite possibly something that works very well, for example (-! hopefully, anyway here's a chance for you to check the readability of my coding !-) ... http://www.macfh.co.uk/JavaJive/ProgScriptWeb/SRTM.html ... or if anyone prefers just to play a little with the finished article, try experimenting by adding URL parameters giving British Isles lat/lon locations (parameter details are given on the Help page which is displayed by default if either no parameters are given or there is an error in them) to ... http://www.macfhsrtm.appspot.com/ For example, this will obtain the profile displayed at the bottom of the first-linked page ... http://www.macfhsrtm.appspot.com/?x1=-1.317&y1=60.243&x2=-1.359&y2=60.394&pr =true&db=true _______________________________________________ get_iplayer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/get_iplayer
