Python on riscos

[Paul Boddie]

Mr  J C Greenwood <jcg at argonet.co.uk> wrote in message news:<4ab39b79acjcg at argonet.co.uk>...
> 
> I have got a bit of an idea of what Python is about by looking at this
> newsgroup for a few weeks, and am asking myself whether to get into it
> more. I am not doing any programming at the moment and, if I did, the
> first choice would be "BBC" Basic that is incorporated into the RiscOS
> operating system, mainly because I am familier with it. Python would be a
> clear choice if I wanted platform independence.

I suppose, if memory is tight on your RISC OS machine, you might want
to stick with BASIC, but Python offers so many advantages over BBC
BASIC that you'll never want to go back once you start writing Python
code. Whilst BBC BASIC fans frequently applaud the "structured
programming" features of that language, such features were only ever
"radical" because other BASIC dialects in the early-to-mid 80s didn't
support them. Functions, procedures and loops are one thing, but BBC
BASIC offers no decent support for data structures (I don't consider
arrays and blocks decent), so one quickly becomes inefficient as a
developer once programs in that language become sufficiently
complicated.

Python's object-oriented features only add to the impression that BBC
BASIC is quite a primitive language. It's rather unfortunate that many
RISC OS developers have turned to C or (to a lesser extent) Perl
because BBC BASIC never addressed the limitations described above. But
unlike those languages, Python's clean syntax should appeal to you as
an established BASIC developer, and you'll probably appreciate the
interactive Python environment too.

> I guess that this would be the case for most RiscOS programmers and may
> mean that there is less incentive for them to use Python etc. This may
> mean that there is also less incentive for porting all the Python bits to
> RiscOS.

>From what I've seen, the port to RISC OS seems rather well done; to
have that work integrated into the standard distribution so quickly
when other ports have taken a long time (Mac) or never even got that
far (Amiga?), despite the sometimes bizarre nature of RISC OS, is a
fine achievement in my opinion.

As this thread has illustrated, though, many packages may be difficult
to port because of RISC OS limitations and not because people don't
have the inclination. Motivation does play a part, though, but for
many reasons: people like myself may have made good use out of Python
many years ago on RISC OS - I tried to make C++ do what I wanted back
in the early 90s, but implementations weren't really suitable - but
now I have moved on and have no inclination to use RISC OS at all.

> I _know_ that the RiscOS scene is tiny compared with Windows or MacOS but
> it is alive and kicking. I hope that it can be included in the impressive
> list of operating systems that are fully supported by Python.

I'd say Python fully supports RISC OS now. You even get a low-level
interface to the operating system!

> Are there really useful applications written in Python? Where would they
> be listed?

There are quite a number. Go to http://www.python.org and check out
the "Vaults of Parnassus", or visit http://www.sf.net and search for
projects which use Python. You're sure to find quite a few that way.

Paul