An Interview With Guido van Rossum

An anonymous reader submits "The folks over at artima.com have finished posting a 6 part interview with Guido Van Rossum, Python's creator and Benevolent Dictator for Life. The interview covers topics ranging from Python's origins and design goals to increased productivity to runtime typing." (We linked to this series of interviews before as well.)

Comments

Mr Rossum

[PhysicsGenius]

I've been using Python for quite some time now and I've found it vastly superior, both functionally and from a maintenance standpoint, to both Perl and PHP. One knit, though. Why on earth make whitespace vital to the compiler? For business reasons I have to edit my programs in Windows but run them on Linux. Editing out all those ^M's is a big pain.

Re:Mr Rossum

[baldass_newbie]

Why on earth make whitespace vital to the compiler?

And you think it's superior to PHP and Perl?
Seriously?

Re:Mr Rossum

[Charlton Heston]

Here's a script for you. I call it no_cr
----

#!/bin/sh

for i in $@ ;
do
if [ -f $i ]
then
echo "Fixing" $i
cp $i /tmp/$i
cat /tmp/$i | tr -d '\r' | tr -d '\032' > $i
rm /tmp/$i
fi
done

--
And this part is here to avoid the lameness filter.
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Re:Mr Rossum

[costas]

Well, AFAIK, 2.3 (or maybe 2.2) has finally taken this issue away. EOL conventions donot matter for source code any more.

Re:Mr Rossum

[Scarblac]

Why on earth make whitespace vital to the compiler? For business reasons I have to edit my programs in Windows but run them on Linux. Editing out all those ^M's is a big pain.

That has nothing to do with significant whitespace - it only occurs at the end of lines, not at the beginning.

Most Linux distros have tools named 'dos2unix' and 'unix2dos' that can do the conversion for you.

Re:Mr Rossum

[sigwinch]

I've been using Python for quite some time now...

Translation: five minutes.

...and I've found it vastly superior, ... functionally... to both Perl and PHP.

Duh. Perl isn't very good for functional programming. And PHP? Ha! It's barely a procedural language. Have you tried Scheme+? It's fully functional, and uses brackets instead of parentheses so it's vastly easier to read.

One knit, though.

<sigh> A veiled reference to the long-running dispute between the Perl lib_sock camp, and the proponents of PySock. Get over it. Modern implementations are comparable in performance, and the API problems in PySock were fixed long ago.

Why on earth make whitespace vital to the compiler?

One of the greatest insights in modern physics is that the vacuum is an active player. Defining the language with space as well as substance provides an independent structure by which to understand your programs. I saw at the last COMDEX that Rational is working on a tool that lets you graphically design and refactor Python code using Feynman diagrams.

For business reasons I have to edit my programs in Windows but run them on Linux.

Hello? Wine! Duh!

Editing out all those ^M's is a big pain.

This is why experienced Python programmers store their programs as XML. It's disgusting to see someone waste time on platform incompatibilities in this day and age. Remember: write once, run everywhere.

Running everywhere is good exercise, anyway. Not only can you proactively reengineer core business centers, you can get that ripped look so popular in today's nudist conference rooms.

Re:Mr Rossum

[Anonymous Coward]

Editing out all those ^M's is a big pain.

Yeah, typing

perl -pi -e 's/\r//g' filename

is a real chore

Re:Mr Rossum

[trouser]

There's no shortage of editors which will save files properly. If I ever have the misfortune to find myself trying to work on a Windows machine I download vim. Or you could try winpython. I suspect it has the option to save not broken files and it also does neat code completion stuff.

Why make whitespace vital ? Why use braces to mark a block in code ? Why use line numbers ?

You have to have some way of letting the compiler/interpreter know what's inside/outside a for/if/while etc. block. The whitespace thing takes a little getting used to but it follows the indentation rules you probably should be applying to your code anyway in the interests of producing readable and hopefully maintainable code so it shouldn't be too great a hardship.

Re:Mr Rossum

[ultrabot]

This is why experienced Python programmers store their programs as XML.

Huh? I consider myself an experienced Pythom programmer, and I've never heard of programs being stored in XML.

BTW, once you realize that you should use The Editor, whatever the platform, you will realize that all this whitespace whining is worthless. And other editors, on win32 and Unix alike, can be trivially configured to write tabs as spaces.

Re:Mr Rossum

[Quill_28]

And they say unix in not intuitive. Ha!

also :%s/^M//g

in vi also works.

The ^M is created by holding down the ctrl-V and then hitting the M key.
See even someone as dull as I can learn this stuff.

Re:Mr Rossum

[an_mo]

Alternatively, you can use a decent text editor such as TextPad which lets you save your files in unix format, not to mentions other useful features for coders.

Re:Mr Rossum

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? I consider myself an experienced Pythom programmer, and I've never heard of programs being stored in XML.

He was joking, ultrabot. Time to tweak your humor subroutines?

Re:Mr Rossum

[KewlPC]

dos2unix is your friend

Two words that don't go together

[GuyMannDude]

The folks over at artima.com have finished posting a 6 part interview with Guido Van Rossum, Python's creator and Benevolent Dictator for Life.

I'm trying to remember the last time I saw the words "Guido" and "Benevolent" in the same sentence together...

GMD

Well, _I_ heard...

[msouth]

...that he refused to answer any questions

until

they were indented
correctly

a patch for no_cr

[Anonymous Coward]

1,13c1,2
< #!/bin/sh
<
< for i in $@ ;
< do
< if [ -f $i ]
< then
< echo "Fixing" $i
< cp $i /tmp/$i
< cat /tmp/$i | tr -d '\r' | tr -d '\032' > $i
< rm /tmp/$i
< fi
< done
<
---
> #!/usr/bin/perl -pi
> y/\r//d