[python-advocacy] [PSF-Members] Thanks for Community Efforts on Forrester Research Survey

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Wed, 06 Jun 2007 14:20:51 PDT, "Guido van Rossum" writes:
<snip>
>> And the last question, a bit odd, is whether multiple inheritance is un
>ique to
>> Python, in the class of dynamic languages that excludes Smalltalk and c
>ompiled
>> languages.
>
>Gee, I don't know. I always assumed Ruby and Perl would support it
>too. Maybe it *is* unique though?

Perl yes.  Ruby no, at least for the defintion of multiple inheritance
that I use.  They do have support for what they call mixins, which
sort-of accomplishes the same thing.  A mixin is a class that cannot be
instatiatied and that does not live in the class hierarchy.  So Ruby
is able to keep a tree structure hierarchy, while Python ends up with a
digraph.  What _Forrester_ considers multiple inheritance, though, only
Forrester knows.

>I find the purpose of educating Forrester a lot more important than
>seeing "how we stack up". I'm getting tired of people proposing that
>Python should grow feature X with no more justification than that Ruby
>or Javascript supports it. Or threatening to learn Ruby if their
>proposal isn't accepted.

Hear Hear!

Laura 

>
>-- 
>--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)