scripting language newbie - compatibility

[Alex Martelli]

Hello Cameron,

> First, I apologize for the delay.  We live in exciting times.

Believe me, I _do_ understand...!  (Next week I'm taking
off for two weeks' worth of badly overdue vacations, at
long last...!-).


> I continue to regard Tcl as more dynamic than Python in the
> sense that it has natural constructs that are more resistant
> to byte-code compilation.  I must recommend this as a purely
> personal view, though; I'm unwilling at this point to construct
> a useful example, so I'll concede that, as a practical matter,
> impartial observers should believe them indistinguishable.
> There is either no big difference, or it's one beyond my
> current ability to explain.

Maybe it's a "cultural" matter -- Tcl'ers as a group being
more used to building code on the fly, the language making
it a more natural approach (or _historically_ having made
it more natural, even should the difference have recently
reduced/vanished), ...?  There are many similar examples;
maybe this is one in this class.

Perl'ers are far more prone to using regex's than Pythonistas,
for example, despite the fact that the two languages are just
about equivalent on that -- because of clearly traceable
historical roots.  Fortran users are more prone than C ones
to have huge global data structures, although today both
languages are about equal in the support for that and for
the alternatives -- because they historically weren't.  A
typical Haskell user isn't likely to strictness-decorate
things, nor a typical ML user likely to laziness-decorate
them.  Etc, etc...


> Thanks, by the way, for your yeoman work in c.l.p.  I learn a
> lot from you.

You're welcome!  And I'm happy I'm being useful...


Alex