Looking for Python programmers--where to search?

[Hartmann Schaffer]

In article <U8bdsAANkDs5EwNJ at ntlworld.com>,
Ian Hobson  <ian.hobson at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> ...
>Pascal was designed for just this purpose, and then some bright spark
>wrote a compiler for it!

I have to disagree: imo pascal is full of features whose only purpose
is to make life easy for the compiler and leaves out (probably for
exactly the same reason) several fundamental language concepts that i
find essential: block structure with finer graining (actually i find
ity very ironic that just about at the time when algol implementors
had found an implementation techniques to implement local blocks
efficiently Pascal decided to drop eliminate that construct for the
sake of efficiency) and self describing data structures (in C at least
you can fake them and teach a few methods how to do it safely).
despite its syntactic clarity i always felt that pascal put the art of
programming back by about 10 years

>Pascal will quickly get out of the way, and it is impossible to do
>naughty things with pointers without significant knowledge. 

again, in years of programming in pascal and derived languages i found
that there are few languages who get as much in the programmer's way
as pascal.  i also found quite a few places in the semantic rules
which are very difficult to explain to a beginner without resorting to
explain how it is implemented

>Python or Pascal would be my choice. 

Python would be ok (though i still would prefer scheme, ml, or
haskell), but i would replace pascal by algol68 (which always received
much less use and support than it deserved), at least a subset that
leaves out some of its more esoteric features.

Hartmann Schaffer