[Tutor] Sun says: Don't use Java, use Python!

[Erik Price]

On Monday, February 10, 2003, at 08:09  PM, Paul Tremblay wrote:

> The script will be over 3,000 lines long. In order to parse the RTF, it
> has to make a dozen or so passes through the file. The reason for so
> many passes is that RTF is very dense. I had written a successful perl
> script that parsed RTF in one pass, but the script is almost 
> unreadable.
>
> The newer perl script (not the one above) makes a module for each pass
> through the file. I thought this was bad design, because I had a dozen
> or so modules.
>
> But you are telling me that it is perhaps best to keep the script
> modular?

[If I ever had to read your script's source code,] I would say so.  One 
of the things that I do like about Java is that it forces the 
programmer to split their code up into separate files (similar to what 
Python does with whitespace and indentation).  Each file contains its 
own public class.  It's not exactly convenient for quick work, but 
that's people generally wouldn't use Java for scripting (after all 
there's Python!).

Every [public] class gets its own file.  If I'm reading through your 
main script and see that you use a class called RtfReader to read and 
parse RTF code, I might want to read the details of how the RtfReader 
works -- or I might not.  Maybe I just want to see what your main 
script does for now and go into the details later.  This is one of the 
nice things about modules and splitting up a 3000-line program into 
modular chunks.

Plus, it's a LOT easier to use your RtfReader in another script than it 
is to search through the source, copy and paste the relevant code, then 
modify it to work in the new script.  A lesson I learned on this very 
list a long time ago (I think it was Danny Yoo) was to use the "if 
__name__ == '__main__'" trick.  Even for the most simple of things, 
like the accessor/mutator script I made for generating JavaBeans and 
posted on this list last week -- I'll probably never use that module 
for anything else, but in case I do, I can just import the module and 
refer to the functions.



Erik



-- 
Erik Price

email: erikprice@mac.com
jabber: erikprice@jabber.org