Designing Large Systems with Python

[Ilja Heitlager]

David Steuber wrote:

>I would like better python support in
>XEmacs.  There is a python mode, but I haven't seen anything about
>evaluating Python code ineteractivly the way you can with Lisp and
>elisp.
I use windows python, it has debuggers and such.

>-> Need GUI's? MFC or tcl/tk?
>
>MFC???? <choke!>  I hope to seperate the functionality from the GUI to
>make both orthoganal to each other.  If I can pull that off, I suppose
>a Windows version would be possible for what I want to do.  I am
>expecting to go straight to XLib and OpenGL.  If I need an abstraction
>layer over X, it would probably be xt.

OK, A UNIX guy (that will change ;-) Take a look at the modules section in
www.python.org
All gui's you mention are supported, there is also a WPY package. It is an
abstract representation and uses MFC on MS or tcl/tk otherwise.


>
>-> Networking, Parsers, XML, HTML, regex?

>I am not sure if I need to use networking.  I am hoping to get
>concurrent development via outside tools like CVS.


If there's ASCII CVS is never a problem ofcourse, but I just named a few
packages.

>

>-> ehh, Python?
>
>It looks interesting.  It is more C like than Lisp like.  I was
>considering using Lisp, but for various reasons I have abandoned that
>idea.  JavaScript is too weak.  Perl is a strong scripting language,
>but it is a real bitch to create C++ style classes.  The syntax is a
>nightmare.  I'll keep it for text munching.


Python has very strong regex support, so you will probably start using
python for that as well ;-)
There is a thread at this moment however discussing performance on LARGE
text-processing in Perl and Python.    I never was much of a parenthesis
fetisjist, so LISP is out of my league. If you need functional constructs,
python has that as well (lambda's etc)
If you need symbolical stuff, I am working on that. I have experience with
Prolog and Reduce/RLISP (Lisp without ()  and  a month ago I took Python to
do symbolical stuff.
It gave me just what I wanted: OO and strong operator overloading. much
better then simple Lisp-tuples. Tell me if you need this kind of stuff.

The last year I did a lot of large system stuff in Java (both pure and MS),
which was a great relief from C. Last month I got to learn Python, which I
love even better. Until now there isn't anything I can think of what I could
not do in Python and JPyhton is probably the HOLY GRAIL.
Guido is king, Python is his round table and we are the knights that follow.