On Mon, Jun 18, 2018 at 10:22 AM, Jim Lee <jle...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On 06/17/2018 02:17 PM, Chris Angelico wrote: >> >> [snip] >> My apologies, stuff wrapped and I misread as I skimmed back. You were >> the one who used the word "shoehorned". In the same way, that sounds >> like you already knew the language, and then someone added extra >> features that don't fit. It's not shoehorning if the feature was >> already there before you met the language. >> >> The point is the same, the citation incorrect. Mea culpa. >> >> ChrisA > > > Of course it is "shoehorning". Why do you care when I started using the > language? Shoehorning implies an attempt to add a feature that didn't exist > in the original design - a feature that is a difficult, awkward, or > ill-fitting complement to the original design. Whether it happened > yesterday or 12 years ago is immaterial. When I personally met the language > is also immaterial. > > Microsoft "shoehorned" a Linux subsystem into Windows. I don't even use > Windows, yet by your logic, I can't call it "shoehorning".
Or maybe that's an indication of a change in design goals. Python's original goal was to be very similar to C, and thus had a lot of behaviours copied from C; up until Python 2.2, the default 'int' type would overflow if it exceeded a machine word. Were long integers shoehorned into the design, or does it indicate that the design was modified to welcome them? Personally, I think the Linux subsystem is (a) no different from (but converse to) Wine, and (b) a good stepping-stone towards a Windows release using a Unix kernel. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
