A 'Python like' language

[Ype Kingma]

Michele Simionato wrote:

> David MacQuigg <dmq at gain.com> wrote in message
> news:<o59960pt4nirvqjea79so494rtevc6mt8e at 4ax.com>...
>> What I found most interesting about this language is that it *doesn't
>> use classes* !!  All objects are derived directly from other objects,
>> some of which are "prototypes", that is, objects which were designed
>> to be just templates to produce other objects.
> 
> Yes, this seemed interesting to me too. But when arrived at the sentence
> "Prothon only allows tabs for indentation" I couldn't continue reading ;-)

The implementation of indentation is a minor issue.
Many editors have facilities to deal with them.
The point is that Prothon uses indentation. I hope 
this will help in making it at least as easy to read
and maintain as Python. Who knows, at some point Prothon
might 'fall back' to spaces...

I like the prototypes _very_ much. They leave out many of the
implicit mechanisms in classes and they are relatively easy
to explain.

My first impression is that one can use prototypes like classes,
but they allow more flexibility. I wonder what influence they
will have on the classic class/object dichotomy in OO land.

As for the 'with' statement: I remember getting introduced to it
in Pascal, where it led to confusion an did not contribute to
code readability because of that. Pascal allowed more than
one variable to be used in the 'with' statement iirc.

On the contrary, the examples in Prothon are quite readable:
no confusion because there is only one implied variable, and
there is syntax (the leading dot) to show where it is used.

I do not yet know in detail how Prothon deals with module
namespaces. These are important for larger scale programs,
so I hope they got that right.

One thing I'm missing on the website is support for basic
structured datatypes like the list and the dictionary in Python.
The syntax support that Python has for these greatly
contributes to useability.

Regards,
Ype