Mike Cox wrote: > As you may or may not know, Microsoft is discontinuing Visual Basic in favor > of VB.NET and that means I need to find a new easy programming language. I > heard that Python is an interpreted language similar to VB.
VB is not interpreted. Sure! You can compile it to P-Code if you want to but most people compile to machine code (like C, C++, Assembler). You are confusing between static linking in C++ etc and mandatory dynamic linking with VB runtimes with interpreted languages. VB needs runtimes but is not interpreted generally. Python is NOT similar to VB. It is much better as a language. VB is optimized to what you are doing currently. Python is a more general purpose language. > This means that > it doesn't have all the hard stuff like pointers, classes and templates like > C, C++ and assembly language. Python has classes. C and Assembly do not have classes and templates. If I remember correctly, VB could have pointers too (Address function?). > Where I work we use Microsoft Office with a lot of customization using > Visual Basic. I would like to switch to Python to do it since VB is being > discontinued. Would Python meet our requirements? I need to make lots of > GUI applications (message boxes, forms, etc.) and do the underlying business > logic too. You will probably find migrating to VB.NET easier than to Python if you have to do WYSIWYG data bound form design. VB.NET is quite a nice language (I personally prefer C#). Much nicer than VB6. Python is better but it may not meet YOUR needs infrastructure wise. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
