"Peter" <vm...@mycircuit.org> wrote in message
news:mailman.661.1262978839.28905.python-l...@python.org...
Sounds good.
Regarding the book's title: is it just me, or are Python programmers
in general put off when people call it "scripting"?
I won't attempt a strict definition of the term "scripting language",
but it seems like non-programmers use it to mean "less scary than what
you might think of as programming", while programmers interpret it as
"not useful as a general-purpose language".
It took me a while to take "scripting" seriously. I grew up with Pascal
and Eiffel and I found it difficult to appreciate dynamic typing and
scripting. The author Langtangen is explaining in detail why he considers
scripting useful, in particular he provides an automatic test suite to run
different language versions ( perl, python, c, c++) of the same program to
compare performance. The results are amazing, in that some of the examples
run faster than the C++ version.
I think if you can get Python to run fast (compared to compiled languages),
then that's scripting (ie. just using it to sequence lots of built-in
functions and operations).
If it runs a lot slower than those other languages, then you're probably
doing some programming.
And with programs where the runtime is not significant, it could be
either...
--
Bartc
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