On Thu, 30 Jun 2005 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > can Python "do it all"?
More or less. There are two places where python falls down, IMHO. One is performance: python isn't generally as fast as C or Java, even with Psyco. However, the number of cases where performance - and absolute straight-line performance of the code - actually matters is much smaller than you might think. Also, you can incorporate C into python pretty easily. The other is in bit-twiddling - anything that involves mucking about with data at the level of bits and bytes. Maybe this is just blind prejudice, but i'm never as comfortable hacking on that sort of stuff (writing a Huffman coder, say) in python as in java. Other than that, python is pure victory. > I am wondering what to learn as my scripting language. Python. > I have read that perl is good up to about 250 lines, and after that it > gets kind of hairy. That's putting it mildly. > I would like opinions as to the suitability of Python as a general > purpose language for programming unix, everything from short scripts to > muds. Python is, all things considered, definitely the best such language. There are strong arguments that can be made in favour of younger cousins of Python such as Ruby and Lua, but none of those have anything like the userbase or third-party code that Python does, and that counts for a lot. LISP (or rather Scheme) would be a more unusual option; it's a language that most people hate, but that people who really take the time to learn it love with a fervour bordering on scary. tom -- In-jokes for out-casts -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
