On 19/02/2016 15:59, Grant Edwards wrote:
On 2016-02-19, BartC <b...@freeuk.com> wrote:
On 17/02/2016 19:49, wrong.addres...@gmail.com wrote:
Could someone kindly tell me advantages and disadvantages of Python?
Something I don't think anyone has mentioned is that Python is
case-sensitive.
That's an _advantage_ not a disadvantage.
Anybody who writes code that depends on the assumption that FOOBAR
foobar and FooBar are identical deserves to have his keyboard explode
under his fingertips.
So keywords, identifiers, library functions and so on have to be
written just right.
IOW, you're expected to do things correctly
You mean pedantically.
In real life, names generally are not case sensitive. I can call myself
bart or Bart or BART or any of the remaining 13 combinations, without
anyone getting confused (but they might be puzzled as to why I'd choose
to spell it bArT).
And in speech there is no distinction between case (so anyone using
voice-to-text is going to have trouble with writing code).
Even in computing, many kinds of names are case-insensitive, emails and
website names for example. I think even MS would struggle to register
all the 32768 upper and lower case combinations of www dot microsoft dot
com. It becomes nonsensical.
It's just a popular fad in programming languages, probably originating
in C and/or Unix, and doing a good job of infesting everything else.
rather that have the
compiler try to guess the intent of your inept typing.
That's not being very helpful then. Do I type help, Help or HELP? Or
would it be a better idea to recognise all of them, instead of
stubbornly refusing to work until I get it exactly right?
[OK, I may be a bit touchy on this subject from dealing with code
written by people used to working on Windows where they assume that
file names are case insensitive, so therefore seem to feel the need to
spice up life by using a variety of spellings for the same damned
file.]
But they're all the same file?
If I had to give you the name of a file over the phone, wouldn't it make
life much easier if I didn't have to describe, letter by letter, which
was upper case and which was lower?
[Most of the code I write uses lower-case anyway, but I also like to
write temporary or debugging code in upper-case. That won't work in a
language like Python. But it's also a nuisance in remembering if it's
tkinter or Tkinter. Or are there actually two different packages
differing only in the case of one letter of their names?]
--
Bartc
--
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
