Do you consider Python a 4GL? Why (not)?

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 12:02 PM, Dave Angel <davea at davea.name> wrote:
> On 06/11/2013 03:48 PM, Laurent Pointal wrote:
>>
>> Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
>>
>>> On Tue, 4 Jun 2013 18:17:33 -0700, Dan Stromberg <drsalists at gmail.com>
>>> declaimed the following in gmane.comp.python.general:
>>>
>>>      <SNIP>
>>
>>
>>> The C compiler suites used this ability to read the error log from a
>>> compile, and move to the line/column in the source file associated with
>>> each error. (Before "integrated" development environments)
>>
>>
>> This is a + for compiled environments that you effectively cannot have
>> with
>> Python, non-syntaxic errors found at runtime.
>>
>
> Sure.  I think they're usually called exceptions.  And lo and behold, they
> come with filenames and line numbers.

Nearly every language has parse-time and run-time errors. Some skew it
further one way than the other, but (a) there will always be run-time
errors (interrupted, out of memory, etc), and (b) it'd be a stupid
language[1] that didn't even *try* to parse a file before running it.
The only difference is that C has a much heavier compile-time phase
than Python does, so the latter has to throw TypeError for 1+[]
instead of failing the compilation.

ChrisA

[1] I opened with "Nearly" because MS-DOS batch does seem to be this stupid.