Closures in leu of pointers?

[Michael Torrie]

On 06/29/2013 12:37 PM, cts.private.yahoo at gmail.com wrote:
> :)  Thank you guys for saying what I was biting my tongue about
> (thanks everybody for the help, BTW!).

Sometimes it's best to state the actual problem you're trying to solve
and see if there's a pythonic solution that fits it rather than to hack
a solution transliterated from C.  I'm curious as to if you did get
something working and what you ended up with.

> This "python-think" stuff was starting to get on my nerves - but then
> it occurred to me that - although having many powerful features - it
> has so many weird restrictions that it requires a special way of
> thinking and problem solving.

Interesting point of view.  "Pythonic" ways of programming is in my mind
the number one appeal of Python.  It's quite clean yet practical.  Has
enough of the intellectual purity of LISP, Smalltalk, and functional
languages to be appealing, yet the practicality of a traditional
procedural language.

In any language, though you have to grasp the data model.  Usually the
criticisms of Python come from not a failure to do this, either because
it's hard to learn at first, or because people dislike learning
something different than what they are used to.  A while back we had a
fairly pleasant gentleman come on the list from a C# background.  His
frustrations with Python stemmed from wanting it to be like C#, which of
course it isn't.  He did not have much success and I'm afraid was left
with a sour taste of Python, which of course had nothing to do with the
language itself.  Python certainly has inconsistencies and there are
newbie behavioral gotchas.

> I have to work with perl's object-orientation stuff again for awhile,
> in order to see if either has an advantage.

Your original post mentioned nothing about object-orientation, so I have
no idea how you intend to use OO design, but I think you'll find
Python's model fairly workable and consistent.