NoneType List

[avi.e.gross at gmail.com]

Alan,

I stand corrected as my path never led me back to any form of PASCAL. And, frankly, my path rarely led me again to having to do what we describe as twiddling bits with the minor exception when doing something like setting the bits needed to specify what permissions should be associated with a file in the UNIX world.

What you say is largely true of programming languages in general. Many are created with some paradigm in mind that sounds like an idea until it meets reality and compromises and adjustments are made. 

When new languages follow that have the ability to gain from prior experience, they may indeed come up with a more nuanced paradigm. I have been studying JavaScript and Node.js lately, for no special reason, and see that as an example of sorts. The former was largely created to run inside a browser and NOT do anything harmful to the user's machine. Lots of parts normally included in other programming languages such as Python were not only deliberately left out but the code often monitors some things to make sure you do not try anything sneaky.

But the language took off and evolved and at some point seemed to people to be a good tool to use on their servers too, and especially since the two sides could exchange relatively live objects such as with JSON. The paradigm had to change as most such programs written in what is now Node.js or other names, actually had to do things to the server including reading and writing files. So they had to add quite a bit and struggled at times to keep other parts of the languages similar as they evolved semi-independently. In my opinion, it remains a futile work in progress.

Has Python managed the version 2 versus version 3 schism to the point where enough users have migrated their code and new users avoid version 2? Other languages have had to split when big enough changes were made. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Alan Gauld <learn2program at gmail.com> 
Sent: Monday, January 2, 2023 3:01 AM
To: avi.e.gross at gmail.com; python-list at python.org
Subject: Re: RE: NoneType List

On 02/01/2023 02:14, avi.e.gross at gmail.com wrote:
> I used PASCAL before C and I felt like I was wearing a straitjacket at 
> times in PASCAL when I was trying to write encryption/decryption 
> functions and had to find ways to fiddle with bits. Similar things 
> were easy in C, and are even easier in many more recent languages such as Python.

That's true of pure Pascal. But Thomas was talking about Turbo Pascal which had extra functions and features for all those "real world" type things. (And you could insert some inline assembler if all else failed) It also relaxed the ludicrously strict typing slightly. Turbo Pascal made Pascal a joy and I still use Delphi for Windows programming today.

TP also introduced classes to Pascal (although Apple had already done so for the Mac and Borland basically ported the syntax to the PC).

--
Alan G
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