Python design philosophy

[Bjorn Pettersen]

Eric Lee Green wrote:
> 
> Gordon McMillan wrote:
> >
> > Eric Lee Green wrote:
> >
> > >Steve Juranich wrote:
> > >> I am *brand* new to python (as of Sunday), and I just got to the
> > >> section in the tutorial about classes.  I was wondering why there
> > >> really isn't such an idea as a "private" member of classes?
> > >
> > >Mostly because Python doesn't "really" have classes. What Python
> > >"really" has are hash tables whose entries are objects (either methods
> > >or other data objects), and some syntactic sugar [...]
> >
> > By this logic, all C++ has is pointers and some syntactic sugar.
> 
> Exactly :-).
> 
> C++ is syntactic sugar for "C". As should be obvious from the fact that most
> early C++ compilers generated "C" as their output :-).

Non Seqitur.  Many compilers for a variety of languages (including
Python) produce C as their output.  That doesn't mean they are syntactic
sugar for C, just that C is close enough to assembly that you're not
going to lose much performance by using it as a target language.

-- bjorn