Promoting Python

[BartC]

On 05/04/2016 06:48, Gordon( Hotmail ) wrote:
> I am struggling to understand the basic principles of Python having
> spent many years as a pure Amateur tinkering with a variety of BASIC

Last time I looked, there seemed to be around 250 dialects of Basic, and 
with wildly differing implementations from pure interpreters to full 
compilers, from GWBASIC to .NET. (Is there even an official standard?)

With Python there are two dialects, and it's often already installed on 
a system (probably not on Windows though). There are a few different 
implementations too, but code I think is largely compatible across them.

> The problem I am finding is most of the sites claiming to help understand Python devote
> far too much space bragging about the wonders of Python instead of...

I fully agree. But you don't have to use classes, exceptions, 
decorators, generators, iterators, closures, comprehensions, meta 
classes, ... the list of meaningless buzzwords just goes on.

It'll cope with ordinary coding as well, although such programs seem to 
be frowned upon here; they are not 'Pythonic'.

> Liberty Basic
> for n = 32 to 255: print n;chr$(n) : next n
>
> REM BBC Basic
> FOR c = 1 TO 15 : COLOUR c
>    PRINT "Color ";c
> NEXT c

Python apparently has hundreds of libraries to do this stuff, which is a 
downside: there are as many libraries as Basics probably! And each seems 
to work a little differently from the other...

I haven't tried graphics in Python, but I would start by googling 
'python basic graphics' or some such phrase.

-- 
Bartc