Interesting talk on Python vs. Ruby and how he would like Python to have just a bit more syntactic flexibility.

[Carl Banks]

On Feb 17, 10:39 am, John Bokma <j... at castleamber.com> wrote:
> Jonathan Gardner <jgard... at jonathangardner.net> writes:
> > Then I looked at a stack trace from a different programming language
> > with lots of anonymous functions. (I believe it was perl.)
>
> > I became enlightened.
>
> If it was Perl [1], I doubt it. Because line numbers are reported

Ok so sonetimes I'm looking at a stack trace and sometimes I can tell
what the bug is just by lookong at the function namess.  But if it has
just line numbers I have to dig through my code looking for the line.


> and
> if that doesn't help you, you can annotate anonymous functions with a
> nick name using
>
> local *__ANON__ = 'nice name';
>
> Finding an issue, and not looking for a solution is not called becoming
> enlightened ;-)

The issue is that a stacktrace showing a bunch of nameless line
numbers can be a bad idea, not that Perl might be deficient (and we
already know that in any case), so it's not good to use a lot of
them.  Anyway once you annotate an anonymous function, it's no longer
anonymous.


> ~$ perl -e '
> use Carp;
>
> my $anon = sub { local *__ANON__ = "hello, world"; croak "oops"; };
> $anon->();
> '
>
> oops at -e line 4
>         main::hello, world() called at -e line 5
>
> As you can see, and a line number is generated, and the nice name is
> shown.
>
> If you generate anonymouse functions on the fly based on parameters, you
> can encode this into the nice name, of course.
>
> Sadly, often bold statements about a language are made in ignorance.

I don't see what he said was any kind of a bold statement about a
language, arguably it was about the coding style.  That Perl allows
annotating functions doesn't mean people do it.


Carl Banks
>
> [1] perl is the program that executes Perl programs ;-).
>
> --
> John Bokma                                                               j3b
>
> Hacking & Hiking in Mexico -  http://johnbokma.com/http://castleamber.com/- Perl & Python Development