On 22 Apr 2005 21:16:04 -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >>>I think of it like the ''.join semantics. The object knows best how >to >>>handle join (even if it looks wierd to some people). In the #! case, >>>the program knows best how to start itself. > >>This I don't understand ;-) > >With ','.join(['a','b','c']) You rely on what wants to join the >sequence to handle the issue of joining rather than have the sequence >understand joining. I think of it as the object knows best. > >I think of #! as "the program knowing best" how to startup, rather >than having to rely on something else to deal with it. I also like the My point was that the "program" -- whether script or executable -- _is_ depending on something else, i.e., whatever is launching it in an appropriate environment, and my real point was that the launcher looks at the beginning of the file contents to check what to do, rather than looking at separate file metadata. I am objecting to embeddeding metadata in data. The convention of using a first #! line in scripts as metadata and passing the whole script to whatever interpreter means that the interpreters have to know to ignore the first line --usually meaning the '#' is a comment line start. Or else it has to be told with a command line option like python's -x to ignore extraneous metadata. Carrying metadata in file names and extensions is not better, just different, and brings a bag of problems, like having no identifier for the data per se, just its various containers.
>text based simplicity and explictness. Just like text based "etc" files >on unix versus the registry in windows. And, if you want you can add >more power like use env variables in #!. >It can be as simple or as powerful as you need, you can use whatever >means you want to manage the #! line: text editors, other programs, >etc. It is data-centric, just like http, sql, file I/O rather than >verb-centric (learn another whole set of methods to figure out how to >change startup). I don't disagree about the usefulness of various text data, I just want to distinguish data from metadata and container identifiers from data identifiers. > >hopefully I am making sense, > I think we were just looking a different aspects of the elephant ;-) Regards, Bengt Richter -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
