On Wed, 04 May 2011 14:58:38 -0500, harrismh777 <harrismh...@charter.net> wrote: : True enough. If I used Jython, I would want to take a look at those : sources... as well as the Java sources... which were wrtten in, um, C.
And then, suddenly, you'll be developing code which fails on CPython instead of code which fails on Jython. Except that it will still fail on Jython too, unless you happen to have the right jvm. Marvelous. : Oh, yes they are. That is the $10,000,000 dollar problem... how to : extricate ourselves from the von Neumann processor. *Everthing* comes : down to that... its hilarious to hear folks talk about lambda the : ultimate (especially those guys on Lambda the Ultimate) when there is no : such thing until such time as we have lambda the hardware architecture. The problem with your approach is that software development does not scale. Assembly worked very well with a few 100 lines of codes half a century ago. C and friends were a great step forward and reduced the complexity to allow another magnitude of lines of codes. Then came further languages further removed from von Neumann, but close enough to human cognition to handle yet a magnitude or too. Of course you can still gain useful understanding by studying assembly or von Neumann, or the instruction set of the CPU you use. And in some projects it may be an optimal strategy. However, there are many skills necessary to make an efficient system and in many projects assembly and hardware skills are far down the list. Virtualisation is there to the cut costs of rethinking solutions for multiple architectures. If you need to understand the implementation to do your programming, you are in fact disregarding one of the most significant achievements deployed in computing the last two decades. : Not conceptually, but practically. For instance, for a C programmer : to see that Python's object references are C void pointers, tells the : newbie Python ( C programmer ) much about how Python considers : variables... as references... to objects. And of course, this is useful as /one/ way to consider python variables. As long as one is aware that this is just an example, one approach out of many, then it enhances understanding. If one blindly extrapolates from one implementation, it enhances misunderstanding. -- :-- Hans Georg -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
