matching one time through a loop

[Peter Hansen]

"David K. Trudgett" wrote:
> 
> On Friday 2002-05-31 at 09:55:04 +1000, Delaney, Timothy wrote:
> 
> > Seriously here ... by not having regular expressions be an integral part of
> > the language, I believe they become much more understandable. It is always
> 
> There might be something in that. However, having learned Perl before
> Python, I just find it really clunky and slow to do regex stuff in
> Python. I find that I miss the power that direct language syntax
> support for regexes gives me. There's obviously a value judgement
> there, of course: one needs to weigh up ease and speed of programming
> with other factors like cleanness, readability, and so on. Obviously,
> Python comes down on the cleanness/readability side, at the expense of
> programmer productivity in text processing.

I believe "programmer productivity" is significantly improved when 
using Python, especially because of the emphasis on readability.

Productivity needs to include not just the time to type the statement,
which is a miniscule portion of the overall effort, but also the
time to revise the design repeatedly (assuming code-and-fix, which 
95% of programmers use) or the time to write test cases, whether
after (for 4% of programmers) or incrementally during (for those
using Test-Driven Development).  In all cases, code maintenance is
a far greater proportion of the work than mere typing, and I 
really don't believe the minor time savings when typing provided by Perl