pygame - importing GL - very bad...

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 at 9:49 PM, someone <newsboost at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ok, I think you're right. At least I find that C-compilers catches many
> errors/warnings which python don't say anything about. But also C require me
> to define/declarer the types of variables before I use them... OTOH I guess
> I like that python is faster to code in, compared to C...

C has typed variables, so it's a compile-time error to try to put any
other type into that variable. Python doesn't. That flexibility comes
at the cost of error-catching. There are hybrid systems, but in
general, type declarations imply variable declarations, and that's
something that Python doesn't want. (I'm of the opinion that
declarations aren't such a bad thing; they make some aspects of
scoping easier. However, that's a design decision that Python is as
unlikely to reverse as indentation-defined blocks.)

> Ok, I'll look forward to that. Recently I had some problems with
> pass-by-value vs pass-by-reference. I googled the problem and found that by
> default python passes by reference.

No, it doesn't. You can find good references on the subject in various
places, but call-by-reference as implemented in Pascal simply doesn't
exist in most modern languages, because its semantics are way
confusing. The name given to this technique varies; here's a couple of
links:

http://effbot.org/zone/call-by-object.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaluation_strategy#Call_by_sharing

ChrisA