A 'Python like' language

[Joe Mason]

In article <c429js$2ddf7r$1 at ID-227230.news.uni-berlin.de>, Daniel Ellison wrote:
> That's what I love about prototype-based languages: they're just so simple.
> Class-based language suffer from the meta-class complication, where in
> Prothon (or in Self, or JavaScript, or Io, etc.) this is a non-issue.
> 
> If the Prothon people can somehow convert the Python libraries, we'll have a
> very interesting situation...

I would like to point out that you can make Python work pretty much the
same way, too, with only a few rough edges.  (Summary starts at
http://www.advogato.org/person/JoeNotCharles/diary.html?start=2 - I
already posted a link to that in response to the initial announcement.)

This has the benefit that you can choose to make just your new classes
prototyped - say, by creating a ProtoBase class with the "__metaclass__ =
Prototype" attribute, so that any subclass of ProtoBase works as in
Prothon and everything else as in classic Python.  That means you can
keep using any existing libraries you want, mix it with new code, etc.

The complexity of the metaclass, of course, can be hidden in a library
so that users don't need to know about it any more than they know how
Prothon works under the hood.

I prefer this to Prothon (he says without having done more than read the
summary on the web page) because it makes only the minimal changes
needed to make Python prototype-based - all the various other changes,
like the tab problem, don't have to be taken into account when deciding
whether to use the language or not.

Joe