Python

On 27 Aug, 09:04, phil chastney
<phil.hates.s...@amadeus.munged.eclipse.co.uk> wrote:
>
> ah, the little things that turn people off
>

Phil, the whitespace behaviour of Python is definitely not a 'little
thing', nor is my objection to it a matter of my personal taste. (From
an aesthetic point of view, I actually like it - it is fine when
you're reading a program, and it reduces clutter). My objection is
based on decades of experience of using many programming languages,
and in particular on merging and maintaining complex source files. It
is extremely easy for indentation to get messed up accidentally. OK,
the editor might try to save you, but if you're cutting and pasting
from a section of code with a different indentation level, you can't
guarantee this. That is why I said what I did - bitter experience, and
many hours spent hunting down bugs in complex programs.

In computing, anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

Richard Nabavi
MicroAPL Ltd

<microapl@microapl.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:6434c8d6-f51a-4e77-8cb9-6d08ba92adeb@d77g2000hsb.googlegroups.com...

....snipped very good information

>
> In computing, anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.
>
> Richard Nabavi
> MicroAPL Ltd

And the corollary: "anything that cannot go wrong, will also go wrong"

cheers

Kerry Liles
(ex IPSA zoo)

Does it follow that:

Anything that seems right, is probably wrong?

David

"David Liebtag" <DavidLiebtag@vermontel.net> wrote in message
news:1219863638.410549@r2d2.vermontel.net...
> Does it follow that:
>
> Anything that seems right, is probably wrong?
>
> David
>

No, it follows that something that's right is wrong and something that's
wrong is right ... and the other way around
\^jk

On Aug 27, 10:32 am, micro...@microapl.demon.co.uk wrote:

> Phil, the whitespace behaviour of Python is definitely not a 'little
> thing', nor is my objection to it a matter of my personal taste.

Richard, I respectfully disagree. I've been using Python regularly
since 2001. It's my second favorite language, and for some tasks I
prefer it to APL.

In all that time, I've been bitten by semantic whitespace about 3
times, and it's never taken more than one minute to sort the problem
out.

The main reason: I develop using the Eclipse IDE with a Python plug-
in. It auto-indents, deals with tabs, and gives me immediate feedback
if I write something that's syntactically incorrect. Of course YMMV,
but there are some very smart people using Python for very large
applications (in Google and NASA, for example).

Romilly

On Aug 25, 2:47 pm, Morten Kromberg <mk...@dyalog.com> wrote:

> In my opinion, the MAIN problem with translation to NumPy, SmartArrays
> or C# is that these languages don't function as a "tool of though" for
> array thinking.

I agree. I've used SmartArrays to build a very successful application
for a Banking customer, but I purchased an APL license at my own
expense because APL let me prototype my ideas so much faster.

Romilly

On 27 Aug, 20:02, "David Liebtag" <DavidLieb...@vermontel.net> wrote:
> Does it follow that:
>
> Anything that seems right, is probably wrong?
>
> David

Actually, yes. In our (non-APL) code conversion work, we see a lot of
what seems to be very high-quality, well-tested, mission-critical
code. Examples include software for medical devices, fail-safe
computing systems, computer-aided manufacturing, railway control
systems, etc - code where you jolly well hope there are no errors. In
every case, without exception, our code analysis tools have found
potentially serious bugs.

My favourite example was a very well-known and highly regarded company
we were trying to sell to. They were very sceptical, but we persuaded
them to let us spend some time at their development centre putting
their code through our conversion tools. The tools gave various
errors messages and warnings, and their technical guy said - "What are
all these errors? Your tool is rubbish." So we looked at the part of
their code which had provoked the errors, and discovered that, for
testing purposes, someone had commented-out a crucial line of code,
had failed to put it back, and so the program logic didn't make any
sense. Just at that moment the boss walked in to see how we were
getting on.

We got the sale.

Richard Nabavi
MicroAPL Ltd

On Wed, 27 Aug 2008 08:04:15 GMT, phil chastney
<phil.hates.spam@amadeus.munged.eclipse.co.uk> wrote:

> microapl@microapl.demon.co.uk wrote:
> > Yes, I agree with Morten on this.
> >
> > On Python generally, I've played with it, and it is an interesting
> > language. (We might well add an interface to from APLX, in the same
> > way that we have with Ruby). However, it has one feature which seems
> > to me so spectacularly bad that I personally would never touch it,
> > namely the fact that the program logic depends on white-space
> > indentation. <snip>

> ah, the little things that turn people off <snip others>
> I never liked the way Unix shell scripts treated explicit tabs
> differently from a visually identical sequence of spaces, but there's a
> big difference between "not liking" and "never touching"
>
Shell scripts are fine, unless you set IFS perversely.

It's make-files that require tabs and fail confusingly if you have
spaces. Except for GNU-make aka gmake which does the intuitive thing.
(Well, as much as any handcodable 'make' can be intuitive. <G>)

- formerly david.thompson1 || achar(64) || worldnet.att.net