what has python added to programming languages? (lets be esoteric, shall we ; )

[dadapapa at googlemail.com]

It's true that most features of python are intentionally borrowed from
other languages. If I can think of anything that I believe to be
specific to python, I would say it is the combination of high level
datatypes together with an extremely simple syntax. Actually, this
combination often results in idioms that --- although adapted from
other languages --- are seldom as clear as in python. Examples for this
are one-liners like

     x,y = y,x
     a,b,c = f(x)
     for key in my_dict : do_some_thing_with(my_dict[key])

It might be that Guido adapted such notations from ABC, a language I am
not familiar with, but as far as I know, the syntactic sugar for high
level datatypes is one thing that
distinguishes python from other languages.

- harold -