what does := means simply?

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, May 19, 2018 at 4:53 AM, bartc <bc at freeuk.com> wrote:
> On 18/05/2018 19:36, Chris Angelico wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, May 19, 2018 at 3:27 AM, bartc <bc at freeuk.com> wrote:
>
>
>> Once again, you're confusing *porting* with *emulating*.
>
>
> This is the point. Those libraries are specific to Python and cannot be
> ported.
>
> And very often they don't just provide general support that can be found, in
> different forms, in any target language, but is also specific.
>
> Then if you are still porting your application, rather than rewriting or
> heavily adapting, you will need to emulate what they do.
>
>> If you don't
>> understand the difference between those two concepts, I recommend
>> spending some time with Wikipedia.
>
>
> And I recommend you doing some actual porting from Python or any other big
> language.
>

I've ported code from 8086 assembly code to C++, from C to Pike, from
DeScribe Macro Language to REXX, and many other pairings, some obscure
and some not. Each time, the goal has been to port the PROGRAM, not
the underlying libraries. The goal is to reimplement the algorithm in
a new language, not to blithely rewrite one line of code at a time
using the new language's syntax.

I have a quarter century of experience with a quarter million
languages. (Okay, that's a bit of a Threepio exaggeration, but a lot
of languages.) Porting code from one language to another is not new to
me.

ChrisA