Going the PL/1 way

[Harald Massa]

Ville,

just to add some:

> I guess this depends on the developer. I can't help lovin' stuff like
> genexps that are coming in 2.4, 

yeah, I am really looking forward to them. List comprehensions are a so 
natural way to express some situations, and with the additional elegance 
of "not having to lock memory" it will be even more phantastic.

Also ... the sets module, introduced with 2.3, I think. It is SO natural 
- many, many problems can be formulated within sets-algebra (find all 
customers who have X and Y ... just get the intersections of two sets). 
And with 2.4 sets will be a builtin, that shows me the commitment of the 
Python community that they will be supported for EVEN longer  than the 
usual many years of a stdlib module.

And: the decimals data type. When working in the financial industry, it 
is UNBELIEVABLE PHANTASTIC to finally get a feature that helped COBOL 
live THROUGH AGES. (while being the MOST UGLY chick on the block, COBOL 
allways had VERY WEALTHY boy friends - not being cool, but having a big 
car, big house...) - and now Python will be ONE OF THE FIRST really sexy 
chicks of programming languages that will have a DECIMAL type!!

Than: datetime, introduced with 2.3. Yes, there was mx.datetime before. 
Who has read a DBAPI-Database-Driver? "try: import mx.datetime ... 
except: print some wired error" --- with datetime in the standard lib  
there is no longer a need to download additional modules just to print 
nice dates. GREAT!!!

I do not understand at all what's that decorators thingy, but I know that 
girls often put some deco into flats and it really looks cosy after, so I 
assume that decorators are not on the dark side of the source. 

Maybe we should ask for a ternary decorator, because I learned that 
"ternary" and "decorator" triggers high emotions within the Python 
community.

I often struggle with encodings - and in growing versions of Python you 
can see that also Python does sth. more with encodings - allowing unicode 
in more and more places, growing "string types" instead , putting 
Encoding-Tags within source code. That's a healty relationship with a 
language, I feel, when the language and me are struggling with the same 
problems.

So: I am really looking forward to Python 2.4, decorated or not, I will 
take it.

Harald