Re: When someone from Britain speaks, Americans hear a "British accent"...
Grant Edwards <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm an American who grew up watching plenty of BBC, and I run > into afew native Londoners whom I have hard time understanding. > I don't ever remember having troubly understanding people > outside the city. But have you encountered regional dialects? - e.g. from the north of the country, where you get both a strong accent, very different from London speech, and the use of different words. For example, folk in parts of the north-east will say "canny" instead of "careful", "gannin" instead of "going", "bonny lass" instead of "pretty girl". The question "Do you know what I mean?" expressed phonetically in Geordie (one of the north-eastern dialects) becomes "Ya knaa what ah mean, leik?" Nick -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Why Python does *SLICING* the way it does??
[EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Many people I know ask why Python does slicing the way it does. > Can anyone /please/ give me a good defense/justification??? > I'm referring to why mystring[:4] gives me > elements 0, 1, 2 and 3 but *NOT* mystring[4] (5th element). mystring[:4] can be read as "the first four characters of mystring". If it included mystring[4], you'd have to read it as "the first five characters of mystring", which wouldn't match the appearance of '4' in the slice. Given another slice like mystring[2:4], you know instantly by looking at the slice indices that this contains 4-2 = 2 characters from the original string. If the last index were included in the slice, you'd have to remember to add 1 to get the number of characters in the sliced string. It all makes perfect sense when you look at it this way! Nick -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Thoughts on some stdlib modules
vegetax <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > And those thoughts comes to mind again, if python is such a great language > why does the stdlib is so bloated with duplication,bad bad library > design,clumsy to use modules,etc. > I mean is this normal? i dont think so.I havent seen such a messy stdlib in > any language. Perl hardly covers itself with glory in this regard. And what of Java? AWT & Swing, Date & Calendar, Streams, Readers and java.nio... There's a lot of complex layering going on there, with many older features being buried and then deprecated (actually or effectively). The net result may be interesting for software archaeologists, but hardly inspires the notion of a coherently designed library. > Is it because of legacy code and backwards compatibility or The full benefits and limitations of particular design decisions take a while to emerge, after which point people are depending on the code and you are limited to refactoring the implementation without changing the interface - unless you are prepared for the howls of protest from those whose code breaks. So to some extent the problems you mention are unavoidable - but I think you overstate your case. > because not too much people in the python-dev cares about library design? I doubt that. > admit the python language design is really really great but the stdlib is > totally forgotten. This is a very extreme view. The standard library isn't perfect, but it is far from being the mess you imply. My own personal bugbear is the issue of consistency. Java's standard library might be a huge and clumsy beast with more than its fair share of overloading and obsolescence, but it at least has the virtue of more consistently following conventions on how classes and methods are named, for instance. Nick -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
