Long Live Python!

[Bruce Sass]

On Thu, 12 Jul 2001, Alex Martelli wrote:
<...>
> How anybody could deduce from that thread that Python is not
> suitable to typical scripting operations is the real mystery
> to me here.

You guys are way too sensitive, and must not have read past the
"horrible scripting..." part of the message (and I probably should
have put a <wink> or <grin> in there someplace, <sigh>).

The point was that python and sh operate on different levels.
e.g.,

$ cat file*1 file*2 file*3 | tee file4 | wc -cwl >> file5

(i.e., concatenate some unknown number of files whose names match one
of three patterns, write the result to a file and count the
characters, lines and words, appending that result to a different
file)

is what in Python....
...2 lines, 3, 4, an explicit loop, a function or two, or maybe a
program (i.e., some imports, assignments, blocks of code, ...)?


Ya, I know, for some... "script" == "interpreted", for the rest of
us... "script" == "automating a sequence of command line operations".
I guess it was a mistake to play off that bit of ambiguousness as an
introduction to the point.


- Bruce