Python was designed (was Re: Multi-threading in Python vs Java)

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, 17 Oct 2013 07:49:52 -0700, Mark Janssen wrote:

> It's like this.  No matter how you cut it, you're going to get back to
> the computers where you load instructions with switches.  At that point,
> I'll be very much looking in anticipation to your binary-digit lexer.

Why stop there? If you go back far enough, you've got Babbage with his 
Analytical Engine and his laboriously hand-cast analog gears.

Nobody disputes than once there were no parsers or lexers, and then some 
time later there were. But so bloody what? That is ancient history, 
irrelevant to the practice of computer programming for the last sixty 
years. There is likely hardly anyone still alive who was programming 
using switches, there weren't that many of them in the first place and 
they would be in their 80s or 90s now.

It's not the fact that parsers once didn't exist that people object to, 
but your total misunderstanding of when that was and its significance to 
computer science today.

Relevant:

http://www.xkcd.com/451/



-- 
Steven