carpe linguam

[Alexander Williams]

On Thu, 26 Aug 1999 19:18:04 GMT, Garrett G. Hodgson
<garry at research.att.com> wrote:

>thread is that the profitable ones tend to be stated as, "i find
>feature X from language Y really useful.  does/could python
>have this?"

Or, in many cases, 'How can I emulate this feature in Python?'

In the case of, say, Scheme, we've discussed how to impliment
closures.  (I use the creation of a class with a __call__ method to
store local state, myself, on that one.)

>From Haskell/ML, we've discussed Generators and posible syntaxi for
them.  (I, myself, think that list Generators should be added to the
language with syntax like Haskell's, but there are certainly other
ways to do that with the tools that're built in to the object system.)

>From Haskell, we've also discussed things like lazy evaluation and
infinite streams.  (A method of handling infinite streams with lmbda
was just posted recently; I, again, would like to see laziness and
infinite streams built in at C speed; there's just so much fun to
saying [1..] and getting back an infinite list of integers to map on.) 

The Python community is remarkably /open/ to cross-language
fertilization, the very design of the language shows that.  The
problem with this most recent fiasco was not, despite some suggestion,
on the side of the Pythonistas in large amount.  We are, in the main,
flexible enough individually that the idea of someone essentially
suggesting "My way is the Right Way(tm)" is inherently insipid and
obstructive to doing what Pythonistas do best: solving problems.

-- 
Alexander Williams (thantos at gw.total-web.net)
"In the end ... Oblivion Always Wins."