Advocates of languages and programming methodologies sometimes compare the current version of their favorite language to an old version of their disfavored language, resulting in skewed comparisons. For example, Conway writes
"Interpreted languages do two things much better than compiled languages. Firstly, they provide more sophisticated programming tools and support for more advanced programming techniques. For example, Perl provides hashed look-up tables and arbitrary-length arrays as core data types. C doesn't even have a proper string type. Likewise, Perl's data sorting facilities are integrated into the language, so the sorting criteria are directly programmable. Having all the basic tools of programming (i.e. high-level data types and common algorithms) built into the language, rather than having to build them yourself, means that you need to write less code to solve a given problem." I think most of the advanced programming techniques he mentions are part of the C++ Standard Library. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
