What is Python?

[William Tanksley]

On Wed, 20 Sep 2000 17:51:01 GMT, Tim Hammerquist wrote:
>Grant Griffin <g2 at seebelow.org> wrote:
>> I'm sure Larry Wall is a nice guy, but his language is pretty mean: it
>> has more "$@#!$!" curse words than a "Beetle Bailey" comic strip on one
>> of Sarge's bad days. [snipped nauseating pseudo-emot]

>Those curse symbols have spoiled me, I admit.  When I can just tell by
>looking at a variable whether it's a scalar, array, hash, or function
>instead of having to remember how I defined it to begin with, I can
>get on with the coding.  This comes in handy in scaled apps when you
>can't remember defining it at all.

>And I just never got into that whole Visual Basic convention:

That's just about the quickest crayfishing I've ever seen.  Either you
like having the variable tell you what type of data it contains, or you
don't.  Which one?

I like both approaches, but in languages like Python and Perl, the
variable holds data but is clearly not the data (because you can put
ANYTHING you want into the same variable).  Therefore, there's no reason
to make the variable be named after the data, unless you actually need the
type at some point -- and then why force the programmer to use only the
language's predefined types (as nice as they may be)?

>-Tim Hammerquist <timmy at cpan.org>

-- 
-William "Billy" Tanksley