Some notes

[Josiah Carlson]

> Sure, but sometimes outsiders can see some things better.

And sometimes outsiders haven't read the threads <wink>.


> >not some Windows-only toolkit that doesn't quite have critical mass.<
> 
> Maybe Gui4cli code will be released, etc. (wxPython is much more
> powerful than Gui4cli-like solutions, so they don't compete, they can
> be for different purposes).

Because Python already has a standard GUI toolkit (tk), including
Gui4cli would imply that it was a better fit as a replacement than other
GUI toolkits.

Both wxPython and PyGTK seem to be far better candidates for replacement
of tk than Gui4cli, both due to their much larger user base, and their
cross-platform capability.

There have been non-standard distributions of Python, sometimes with
more packages specifically for a particular set of platforms. 
Activestate makes one that includes Pythonwin and MFC bindings for GUI
development (you can get Pythonwin and MFC bindings from pywin32 btw). 
While I doubt that Gui4cli would make it into standard Python, its
inclusion by a 3rd party Python packager is really just a question of
whether someone is interested enough in doing so.

> >Colons are a very important delimiter for Python now, and removing
> them just makes the syntax more ambiguous for both reading and for
> interpreting.<
> 
> I've heard similar comments about the leading whitespace used to
> determine the grouping of statements.
> I keep forgetting those colons, I think they are useful mostly for one
> liners, like:
> if <cond>: <code>
> for c in string: <code>

It turns out that those one-liners are not considered Pythonic.

While there has been some discussion regarding spacing in Python, I
believe for many/most that use Python, indentation as scope is a very
positive thing.

If you don't like indentation as scope, you are free to download the
source, change the parser for your scope delimiter of choice, and
recompile.  Since you can pick up a free copy of Microsoft's compiler 
(if you are on Windows), or GCC is freely available, making a working
Python interpreter for your desired syntax is certainly doable.


> >Becoming more like Mathematica is not something one should hope for.<
> 
> Mathematica is a good and powerful language, with a good design (older
> maybe). I see many similarities between Python and Mathematica, and
> such similarities seem to increase with time. (I know, Python is OO
> and Mathematica usually isn't. But Mathematica can be used as a
> functional language, etc.)

In my opinion, the structure, syntax, readability, etc. of programs
written in Mathematica leaves something to be desired.  That is why I
use Python and not Mathematica (that and Mathematica isn't free).

 - Josiah