Sorry guys. I've read all your responses and I kind of get their general drift, but I'm about four sheets to the wind right now, and no way would I make it more than a step or two in playing around with these things and trying to get my head around them before it would all descend into a cacaphony of gibberish.
Python really is a thing of beauty in a class all its own. I've been doing computers since 1972. I started out doing machine code on IBM's 7090 octal machine, then I stepped up to assembler on the hexadecimal IBM 360/40, a mainframe that needed a machine room the size of two classrooms to house it and all its peripherals. (Disk drives were the size of huge round birthday cakes, tape drives were each housed in 4' x 4' cabinets, and the printers had to go out in the hallway because they couldn't even fit in the same room with the computer.) The first high level language I stepped up to was PL/1, a real behemoth of its time, a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other procedural languaage from its insides out, and a full set of all its manuals filled a small library. Funny though, for all its "primitivity" compared to modern languages, we did artificial intelligence, symbolic calculus (no numbers, just complex integrals and differentials of function names, with x, y and z for arguments) and weather modelling with it. And I've learned smatterings of Java, C and C++, but nowhere have I seen the kinds of magic that can be done with python. I've been exposed to applying functions to a list of values, so I fully believe that what you present is valid python and it works. I just don't fully understand how and will have to work with it. So, in the morning I'll scrape my braincells together and work with what you've given me, and see if I can understand it and make your examples work. Well worth the detour from finding the perfect place to move to (a project that has become a little less urgent due to recent events). So stay tuned. I'm not ignoring you, I just need a good night's sleep and then maybe a good long while before I have anything to show for doing anything with this, or even intelligent questions. Thank you all in advance, I'm expecting to learn a lot from this little exercise. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
