This follow-up is for the folks who kindly endured my Python evangelism at last week's monadlug meeting, plus for anyone else who may be interested in this area of recent developments in Python and/or design patterns.
The features we were discussing were iterators and generators, powerful and very helpful constructs closely aligned with certain design patterns. (By "very helpful" I mean that they have enabled me to get things working first time which usually take several hours, or several days, of debugging off- by-one errors, eof-cleanup errors, and so on. By letting the language supply the design pattern you avoid rebuilding the pattern yourself - and avoid attendant development errors.) For additional commentary along the same lines, see Bruce Eckel's brand new, and still evolving, _Thinking In Python_. (*) It hit the Web just in December. The follow-up which I promised is this URL, whose material I used in the talk. It's one of a series of articles Dr. David Mertz writes for IBM's "developerWorks" Linux site. The series is called Charming Python, and the article on iterators and generators is at http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-pycon.html?dwzone=linux And here's the URL for Bruce Eckel's book: http://www.mindview.net/Books/TIPython ------------------------------------------ BTW, I did get XFree86 4.1.0 working. Those who were there know important a milestone this was... :) Enjoy, and thanks for listening - Bill ------------------------------------------ (*) I find Eckel's espousal of Python especially interesting in that he is well known as the author of a number of O-O books about older languages, namely _Thinking in C++_ and _Thinking in Java_. What Eckel says now: "...Python is my language of choice for virtually all my own programming projects...". "I decided that the best way to initially create my design patterns treatise is to write it in Python first (since we know Python makes an ideal prototyping language!) and than translate the relevant parts of the book back into the Java version. I�ve had the experience before of casting an idea in a more powerful language, then translating it back into another language, and I�ve found that it�s much easier to to gain insights and keep the idea clear." "Favorite quotes (I fell in love with Perl for a couple of months, and explored all the (dark) corners. It's what eventually drove me to Python). o Python is executable pseudocode. Perl is executable line noise. o Perl is like vice grips. You can do anything with it, and it's the wrong tool for every job. o Perl is worse than Python because people wanted it worse. Larry Wall (Creator of Perl), 14 Oct 1998 o I would actively encourage my competition to use Perl. Sean True, 30 Mar 1999 o The secret to good performance is to prototype and prototype, then code the bottlenecks in a faster language. The secret to large systems is to prototype and prototype, until you've got clean separation of the system into managable pieces, then code in whatever language most suits the need of each piece. Gordon McMillan, 15 Dec 1999 o 'Complexity' seems to be a lot like 'energy': you can transfer it from the end user to one/some of the other players, but the total amount seems to remain pretty much constant for a given task. Ran, 5 Mar 2000" ***************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the text 'unsubscribe gnhlug' in the message body. *****************************************************************
