Python for philosophers

[Gregory Ewing]

Citizen Kant wrote:
> I roughly came to the idea that Python could be 
> considered as an *economic mirror for data*, one that mainly *mirrors* 
> the data the programmer types on its black surface, not exactly as the 
> programmer originally typed it, but expressed in the most economic way 
> possible.

At best, this would be true only for a very small
subset of things that you can enter into the
interactive interpreter.

Even confining yourself to arithmetic expressions,
there are problems. Consider:

 >>> 12**34
4922235242952026704037113243122008064L

The input is 6 characters long, and the output
is 37 characters long. Is that more "economical"?

-- 
Greg