some problems for an introductory python test

[Chris Angelico]

On Tue, Aug 17, 2021 at 3:51 AM Hope Rouselle <hrouselle at jevedi.com> wrote:
>
> Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> writes:
> >> Wow, I kinda feel the same as you here.  I think this justifies perhaps
> >> using a hardware solution.  (Crazy idea?! Lol.)
> >
> > uhhh........ Yes. Very crazy idea. Can't imagine why anyone would ever
> > think about doing that.
>
> Lol.  Really?  I mean a certain panic button.  You know the GNU Emacs.
> It has this queue with the implications you mentioned --- as much as it
> can.  (It must of course get the messages from the system, otherwise it
> can't do anything about it.)  And it has the panic button C-g.  The
> keyboard has one the highest precedences in hardware interrupts, doesn't
> it not?  A certain very important system could have a panic button that
> invokes a certain debugger, say, for a crisis-moment.
>
> But then this could be a lousy engineering strategy.  I am not an expert
> at all in any of this.  But I'm surprised with your quick dismissal. :-)
>
> > Certainly nobody in his right mind would have WatchCat listening on
> > the serial port's Ring Indicator interrupt, and then grab a paperclip
> > to bridge the DTR and RI pins on an otherwise-unoccupied serial port
> > on the back of the PC. (The DTR pin was kept high by the PC, and could
> > therefore be used as an open power pin to bring the RI high.)
>
> Why not?  Misuse of hardware?  Too precious of a resource?
>
> > If you're curious, it's pins 4 and 9 - diagonally up and in from the
> > short
> > corner. http://www.usconverters.com/index.php?main_page=page&id=61&chapter=0
>
> You know your pins!  That's impressive.  I thought the OS itself could
> use something like that.  The fact that they never do... Says something,
> doesn't it?  But it's not too obvious to me.
>
> > And of COURSE nobody would ever take an old serial mouse, take the
> > ball out of it, and turn it into a foot-controlled signal... although
> > that wasn't for WatchCat, that was for clipboard management between my
> > app and a Windows accounting package that we used. But that's a
> > separate story.
>
> Lol.  I feel you're saying you would. :-)

This was all a figure of speech, and the denials were all tongue in
cheek. Not only am I saying we would, but we *did*. All of the above.
The Ring Indicator trick was one of the best, since we had very little
other use for serial ports, and it didn't significantly impact the
system during good times, but was always reliable when things went
wrong.

(And when I posted it, I could visualize the port and knew which pins
to bridge, but had to go look up a pinout to be able to say their pin
numbers and descriptions.)

> I heard of Python for the first time in the 90s.  I worked at an ISP.
> Only one guy was really programming there, Allaire ColdFusion.  But, odd
> enough, we used to say we would ``write a script in Python'' when we
> meant to say we were going out for a smoke.  I think that was precisely
> because nobody knew that ``Python'' really was.  I never expected it to
> be a great language.  I imagined it was something like Tcl.  (Lol, no
> offense at all towards Tcl.)

Haha, that's a weird idiom!

Funny you should mention Tcl.

https://docs.python.org/3/library/tkinter.html

ChrisA