> I am not a newbie to programming.I already learnt C language.I > enjoyed it a lot. > But I am not a computer student.So I don't require a hifi language > like C.
C is a tterrible language for computer students, its usually used by engineering types who need to interact with the computer at a low level. C is full of what computer scientists view as very bad practice! > I am an electronics student.I would really like to know if the > language like Python will be of any help(use) to me As an electronics grad who workds in telecoms designing large scale software systems I'll try to answer! :-) It is extremely useful for modelling problems - if you already use tools like mathematica to build math models of waveshapes, filter characteristics, stochastic noise models, data traffic analyses, etc etc Python can do all that too. For general purpose programming Python can build all your test harnesses, integrate your code libraries, manage your project files etc. For network access there are very good socket and serial port libraries and a bunch of internet protocols supported, it can also use a pile of more obscure libraries contributed by others - I've seen HPIB, Centronics and S-COM interface libraries and several others have been discussed on this list. Where its not so great is in building bespoke interfaces to new hardware - there are no direct input/output peek/poke type functions, no direct memoruy access etc. The usual silution is build a thi access library in C then wrap that as a Python module with the higher level interface functions written in python and calling the hardware routines in C. > .Also I heard that it is an intrepeter language. > Is it true? Yes in the same sense that Java, C#, Perl and Smaltalk are interpreted. The code is compiled into byte code and then run in a virtual machine interpreter. There are even translators from python to Java byte code so you can run it on any JVM and integrate with all the Java libraries out there. > If yes I would like to know whether it is fast or not. Try it and see. The answer will depend on what you are doing, what your computing architecture is and how well you write the code. If its not fast enough you can usually idfentify the bottleneck and rewrite that part in C. Python was explicitly designed with that style of build it, tune it, rewqrite the bottlenecks type of development cycle in mind. Only Tcl is better suited to that kind of tweaking IMHO. > Also I would like to know the capabilities of Python. It can do most things, and usually more easily than in other languages but have a look at the python web page, there are lots of advocacy stories and case studies there. > (If I am really convinced I would use it for my life).. No language is perfect and you will likely find it easier to have several languages to use as appropriate. But Python can do the lions share. Personally I now use Python 70%, Delphi 15%, C/C++/ObjectiveC 10% and a variety of others(Tcl, Awk, Java, Smalltalk, Lisp etc) for the final 5% HTH, Alan Gauld Author of the Learn to Program web site http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
