On Wednesday 09 February 2005 11:41, Ira Abramov wrote:
> Quoting Yishay Mor, from the post of Wed, 09 Feb:
> > Here's a few more:
> >
> > http://www.squeak.org/
> > http://toontalk.com/ (which we use in WebLabs -
> > http://www.weblabs.eu.com) http://csis.pace.edu/~bergin/karel.html and
> > http://xkarel.sourceforge.net/eng/
> > And of course, the queen mother of educational languages,
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_programming_language
>
> all these fail the simple test of real-world usefulness. with Python you
> write psuedocode and it just RUNS.
Many Pythoneers rave about how Python is runnable Pseudocode. However, this is
completely not true, as Python code is not pseudo-code. In Pseudocode you can
use any notation you like (even an inconcistent one) as long as the algorithm
is correct. For example, you can use Len(a), len(a), a.len(), a.Len(),
Length(a), a.Length(), length(a), a.length() or something with
{n,N}um_items(), {c,C}ount(), or whatever. In Python only one of these
notations will work.
In Pseudo-code you can indent using tabs or a few spaces interchangebly, or
use curly braces ({ ... }). In Python you can't.
Another thing to note is that I'm not sure Python code will be understandable
by people who are not familiar with it, with OOP, etc. Pseudo-code can be
understood by people with a minimal amount of CS education.
I once talked about it with people in the IRC, and someone mentioned he has
written a 200-lines Python program and had to make only 20 changes to get it
to compile and run. I told him they were 20 changes too many, because in
Pseudocode, he would need 0.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
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Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Homepage: http://www.shlomifish.org/
Knuth is not God! It took him two days to build the Roman Empire.
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