On 2009-01-05, Derek Martin <c...@pizzashack.org> wrote: > On Sat, Jan 03, 2009 at 11:38:46AM -0600, Grant Edwards wrote: >> > Or are they also "BIZARRE"!? >> >> One presumes that Mr. Martin finds anything different from his >> first computer language to be BIZARRE. He should try out >> Prolog or something genuinely different. > > One's presumption would be mistaken. However thank you for > illustrating my point so precisely, which was after all the > condescending and insulting way people "communicate" with > people whom (they think) know less than they do in this forum, > and not actually how difficult or easy the assignment model of > Python is to understand.
I'm sorry, but I really don't see how Python's assignment model could be considered bizarre by anybody who's familiar with more than one or two languages. It's actually somewhat common outside the world of FORTRAN/assembly/C/Pascal. The only thing about Python that ever struck me as odd was the semantic significance of whitespace (and that's not without precedents either). The significance of white-space changed very quickly from odd to brilliant. Among the languages I've known, Python is probably in the bottom 10% as far as bizarrness goes. Lisp/Scheme, Prolog, SNOBOL, COBOL, APL, Forth, Smalltalk and several now-forgotton almost-purely-functional languages all seemed to me orders of magnitude more bizarre than Python. I must admit that a some of those languages (e.g. Forth and Smalltalk) probably felt more "bizarre" due to their developement environment than due to the language itself. And then there is C++ which is bizarre only in the extent to which it's a complete dog's-breakfast. Back to work... -- Grant -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
