On 2007-06-16, Steven D'Aprano <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Fri, 15 Jun 2007 22:25:38 -0700, Alex Martelli wrote: >> The "Spirit of C" section in the preface of the ISO Standard >> for C phrases this principle as "Provide only one way to do an >> operation". > > Taken seriously, that rapidly goes to absurdity -- it would > mean, for example, replacing all for loops with while loops.
We do sometimes have to use a while loop in Python where we could use a for loop in some other language. It's not really a big deal. > I'm probably preaching to the converted, because I'm pretty > sure Alex doesn't believe Python should be a minimalist > language with _literally_ only one way to do anything. It's making me think of the male model in Zoolander who can't turn left. ;) >> Despite the phrasing variations, this commonality goes well >> with my perception that, at their roots, Scheme, C and Python >> share one philosophical underpinning (one that's extremely >> rare among programming languages as a whole) -- an >> appreciation of SIMPLICITY AND UNIFORMITY as language >> characteristics. > > Out of curiosity, what do you consider some of the worst > offenders as far as overly complex and inconsistent languages > go, and why? I vote for C++ as being astoundingly complex. But it provides complex features, e.g.,the machanisms it provides to deal with multiple inheritance, or generic, type-safe code. I don't think it's inconsistent, though. The complexity of a feature *tends* to mirror the *real* complexity. -- Neil Cerutti -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
