Python and Flaming Thunder

[Dave Parker]

> > I <davepar... at flamingthunder.com> wrote:
> > Plus, me getting paid to work on Flaming Thunder is far more
> > motivating than me not getting paid to work on Python.

> On May 14, 8:30 pm, John Salerno <johnj... at NOSPAMgmail.com> wrote:
> That's truly disappointing.

I guess I could have stated that better.  Flaming Thunder is a labor
of love for me.  I've programmed in almost every language since
FORTRAN and Lisp, and Flaming Thunder is the language I've always
wished the others were.

For one example, I've always preferred compiled languages because
they're faster.  So Flaming Thunder is compiled.

For another example, I've always preferred languages that are English-
like because it's easier to return to your code after several years
and still know what you were doing (and it's easier for someone else
to maintain your code).

For over 5 years I've been working on Flaming Thunder unpaid and on my
own, getting the back-end up and running.  8-by-8 shotgun cross
compilers written in assembly language, that can fit all of the
libraries for both the 32- and 64-bit versions of FreeBSD, Linux, Mac
OS X and Windows into a single executable file that's less than 180K,
aren't written overnight.

So now that I've released it, it's extremely gratifying that people
think it's cool enough to actually pay $19 for it.  That gives me lots
of motivation (and buys enough time) for me to add features to it as
fast as possible.

To whit: you pointed out the awkwardness in Python of having to
declare a for-loop variable when you only wanted to loop a specific
number of times and didn't need the variable.  Last week, Flaming
Thunder had the same awkwardness.  If you wanted to loop 8 times:

for i from 1 to 8 do <statement>

you still had to use a variable (in this case, i).  This week, I've
added two new for-loop variations that fix that awkwardness, and also
allow you to explicitly declare an infinite loop without having to
rely on idiomatic constructs such as while-true.  Examples of the two
new variations (for-forever and for-expression-times):

Write "Fa".
For 8 times do write "-la".

For forever do
  (
  Write "Do you know the definition of insanity? ".
  Read response.
  ).