Favorite non-python language trick?

[Joseph Garvin]

Claudio Grondi wrote:

>>And you can do block comments with --[[ and ---]].
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>I am very happy not to have such "tricks" in Python.
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>Any other (useful) suggestions?
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>Claudio
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I'm glad and all that not everyone shares my enthusiasm over Lua's 
trick, and I'm glad that C/C++ can do it, but the original issue was 
non-python language tricks in general. Lets keep the thread on track.

So far we've got lisp macros and a thousand response's to the lua trick. 
Anyone else have any actual non-python language tricks they like?

Yeesh.


>"Joseph Garvin" <k04jg02 at kzoo.edu> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
>news:mailman.837.1119596150.10512.python-list at python.org...
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>>As someone who learned C first, when I came to Python everytime I read
>>about a new feature it was like, "Whoa! I can do that?!" Slicing, dir(),
>>getattr/setattr, the % operator, all of this was very different from C.
>>
>>I'm curious -- what is everyone's favorite trick from a non-python
>>language? And -- why isn't it in Python?
>>
>>Here's my current candidate:
>>
>>So the other day I was looking at the language Lua. In Lua, you make a
>>line a comment with two dashes:
>>
>>-- hey, this is a comment.
>>
>>And you can do block comments with --[[ and ---]].
>>
>>--[[
>>hey
>>this
>>is
>>a
>>big
>>comment
>>--]]
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>>This syntax lets you do a nifty trick, where you can add or subtract a
>>third dash to change whether or not code runs:
>>
>>--This code won't run because it's in a comment block
>>--[[
>>print(10)
>>--]]
>>
>>--This code will, because the first two dashes make the rest a comment,
>>breaking the block
>>---[[
>>print(10)
>>--]]
>>
>>So you can change whether or not code is commented out just by adding a
>>dash. This is much nicer than in C or Python having to get rid of """ or
>>/* and */. Of course, the IDE can compensate. But it's still neat :)
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