More information on the concept of Personal Rapid Transit sytems is available here for your enjoyment. The The Advanced Transit Association is an industry organization with many members from the PRT industry. The organization has a History of Personal Rapid Transit available.
Perhaps we should ban having children in the back seat or make it illegal to have cell phones in cars. The statistics support the notion that driving while using a cell phone is at least as bad as driving while drunk and have they ever studied the impact of having children misbehaving in the back seat on the accident rate? It is very easy to vilify people who drink. I am not trying to justify people who get in accidents when they have taken a drink. I just think it is a witch hunt. Bad driving is bad driving, regardless of the cause. To the person who is killed by someone in a vehicle, it doesn't really matter if the person was drinking, talking on a cell phone, or running a light to get to soccer practice on time.
They are still dead.
There is a very real discrimination against people who drink acohol. Some people are very capable of safely driving while at a 0.7 to 1.4 range and others who are stone sober should never be allowed behind the wheel. In some cases they simply don't understand the laws of physics. In other cases they are agressive or self absorbed people who thing they have a right to violate traffic laws when they are inconvenient.
The laws simply do not take into consideration the ability of the driver.Why can't I be qualified to drive with a 1.2 blood alcohol content? I'd pay a premium for the privilage, but I have no such option for being tested for this special skill.
The laws regading driving with children do not have such a bias. I'm scared to death of a soccer mom with a van full of teenagers. First, they don't know how to drive a large vehicle. Second, they are always in a rush and violate more traffic laws than any other group I've seen on the road. the laws are designed to punish behaviors which are disliked (drinking) but not to punish as harshly those behaviors that are tolerated (using cell phones and transporting kids to participate in social activities).
Prior driving records should be given much more weight in the case of driving offences. Like many people I know, I have had no moving violations in over ten years, and yet this has nothing to do with whether I have had a drink before getting behind the wheel.In contrast, I have a friend who never drinks, yet she has had so many accidents that the insurance company almost canceled her coverage. Which one of us is the greater danger to society when behind the wheel?
Let me make it clear that I don't think repeated offendors should be treated the same as those who have demonstrated their ability to make good driving judgements. I know of one person who was involved in a single care accident after he had been drinking. The passenger was killed in the accident. He had at least one prior conviction on a DUI. In the prior convition he had been driving over 70 MPH in a 30 MPH zone. His license should never have been returned based on this first conviction. He had shown a complete disregard for the law by driving in a very inappropriate manner. The offense was clearly worse because he had been drinking. (I'd say the same thing if he had been using a cell phone at the time.) To quote Dirty Harry, "A man's got to know his limitations."
One final observation for those of us in the USA. The society continues to promote the use of human controlled vehicles as the principle means of transportation. The technology exists for creating a transportation system that does not require people to drive long distances with a human controlling the vehicle. It is time to automate the transportation system (with personal vehicles, not buses and trains where I have to sit in a room with people I don't know) so that people are taken out of the control loop. The last major upgrade to the transportation system was the Interstate Hyway System. Fifty years later it is time to make another major infrastructure investment. The side effect will be a massive public works employment boom that can't be sent off-shore.
Your:-) smiley suggests you don't really believe that macros are necessary in order to create a self-extensible language. In Python you would accomplish self-extension by using the meta-programming interface to the language. There's lots of interesting things that can be done using meta-programming to change the nature of the langauge. I supsect you will fine this technique to be as good as or better than macros for creating modified language characteristics. Tracing errors in Python is certainly much easier than in a macro-infested program.
Being compilable is not always the best way to achieve maximum efficiency in a program. The widespread use of Python in the animation industry and on supercomputers at LLNL suggests that optimization of an application does not require that all code must be written in a compiled language.Sometimes it is better to make efficient use of highly optimized modules that are easily reused. With processors running at 2Ghz it is often more important to maximize the efficiency of the programmer rather than the program.
Most of the heavy lifting in Python is done by code that is written in C. The Python language simply makes it much easier to set up the application to run the C code at top speed.
You have obviously not tried using Python. That's your loss. I have yet to hear of a whitespace bigot who tries Python for a few weeks who doesn't change their position regarding the use of whitespace as a block delimiting mechanism. The degree of the conversion ranges from sheepishly admitting that it works very well, to becoming raving supporters of Python because the feature works so well.
Proper indentation of a program is considered good style in all computer languages, including Perl. It is simply good programming practice to indent consistantly within a program. Python simply requires that good style be used in a program, rather than leave it as an option. This seems to irritate many narrow-minded, lazy, and sloppy programmers who think curly braces are the only proper way to denote blocks of code.
A simplier solution, and one that doesn't require infrastructure change, is to require the addition of a field to the mail message header named "UnSolicited" for any unsolicited mail message. Any mail not properly marked would be considered a felony offense with a heavy fine and jail time.
It won't get rid of scam artists who use SPAM, but it will force legitimate businesses that send out SPAM to conform. If the field is present in the header then mail servers could scan the header prior to receiving the entire message. End users could instruct the mail server to selectively filter the SPAM based on the value present in the "UnSolicited" field.
He is letting Perl get in the way of writing clear code. Serveral Python packages are available for processing the stream as it arrives.
The following example from an article by Uche Ogbuji, "Simple XML Processing With elementtree" [1], shows something akin to his perl examples coded using a Python iterator approach. Note that the examples has no regular expressions for recognizing XML syntax. That layer is abstracted out of the object processing. The articles is worth a read if you want to see how easy XML programming can be.
import sys from elementtree.ElementTree import ElementTree root = ElementTree(file=sys.argv[1]) #Create an iterator iter = root.getiterator() #Iterate for element in iter: #First the element tag name print "Element:", element.tag #Next the attributes (available on the instance itself using #the Python dictionary protocol if element.keys(): print "\tAttributes:" for name, value in element.items(): print "\t\tName: '%s', Value: '%s'"%(name, value) #Next the child elements and text print "\tChildren:" #Text that precedes all child elements (may be None) if element.text: text = element.text text = len(text) > 40 and text[:40] + "..." or text print "\t\tText:", repr(text) if element.getchildren(): #Can also use: "for child in element.getchildren():" for child in element: #Child element tag name print "\t\tElement", child.tag #The "tail" on each child element consists of the text #that comes after it in the parent element content, but #before its next sibling. if child.tail: text = child.tail text = len(text) > 40 and text[:40] + "..." or text print "\t\tText:", repr(text)
The book "Colonies In Space" by Heppenhimer?? describes mining the moon by placing a linear accellerator on the surface and then launching bundles of raw ore out to a giant catcher's mitt at the L5 point between the earch and moon. The cost per pound would be reasonable because you only have to accelerate the mass to the excape velocity of the moon. There are no rockets involved in retrieving the materials.
A better choice would be to go to the astroid belt and drag back a couple choice astroids. The moon's gravity well is shallow compared to earth, but the energy required to retrieve an astroid would be many times less than throwing rocks off the moon. It would takes years to do the round trip, but with ion engines the astroid could be put under constant acceleration for the first half of the trip and then reversed to brake for the end of the trip.
I did a little benchmarking recently, and I can confirm that for typical algorithmic benchmarks (not heavily library or IO oriented) Python is more than 100 times slower than C/C++. There's a Python "specializing compiler" called Psyco that produces significant speedup, running my little fibonacci test around half the speed of C, very impressive.
If you are testing something like fibonacci encode in pure Python then yes it will be 100 times slower than C/C++. But if you are doing real world work then you can use the Python library for the most commonly used algorithms, and the libraries are generally well optimized. It's the Batteries Included part of Python that makes it such a productive environment. Optimization is suppose to be the last step in the coding cycle. Get it write in Python first and then recode the bits that are too slow to tolerate in C.
People are using Python for high performance applications. It's all about good software design. If performance was an issue then LLNL wouldn't be using Python to control applications that run for days on supercomputers. Performance isn't an issue because the Python code just sets up the problems to be solved. Python assembles the standard algorithsm and calls them with the appropriate datasets. Also, the Zope server, written in Python, scales to very large web sites because it uses well placed optimization
Re:XML frees us from Perl
on
XML and Perl
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· Score: 1
Absent free-form text munging, Perl really has no advantage over other languages. At the same time, it has real deficits for people who need to know they have solved a problem correctly and completely.
Absolutely. Once you get beyond text parsing by standadizing the syntax, the goal of a program is to manipulate objects. XML maps very well into object trees and that is why it is commonly processed using Java and Python. If you want the powerful capabilities of a dynamically typed language, with a simple, easy to learn grammer, then you should use Python for processing XML, not Perl. (Perl's object syntax is as obtuse as the rest of the language and offers no advantages over the elegant object model of Python. In fact, Larry Wall borrowed much of the Perl object design from Python. Use the genuine original, not the imitation.) The standard Python library includes a fine package for navigating through XML data and zero text processing code needs to be written to do this. It's objects all the way down.
There is a good article that explains how to use Python generators to process XML content. This is something you will never be able to do as easily in either Java or Perl.
The title is misleading. The device is a multi-chip-module, not a single chip computer. They have packaged a number of chips in a very small package, but it is not a single chip. A MCM will cost more to manufacture than a true single chip computer because it requires a ceramic substrate to be manufactured with very small trace widths connecting the chips that are placed on the substrate.
Not all languages leak equally. Examples were given of SQL, VB, C, and HTML. Some of these languages leak like a major artery has been cut. The existance of leaks is more often than not a result of poor management of the evolution of a language. Feature after feature is heaped on the language with special cases and exceptions creeping in everywhere.Little effort is spent on fixing leaks, because that would take time away from attracting new users by tending to their every feature request.
Some languages, such as Python, have language designers who prefer to plug leaks. They are very conservative about adding features to the core language. Most of the heavy lifting is done in the module and package libraries. One example of a seamless patch to a leak is the file abstraction in Python. The module provides and abstraction that allow the different formats for file names to be abstracted away. The differences between seperator characters on Windows, the Mac, and Unix are hidden from the programmer (They need to use the abstract interface to get this benefit, but the language design allows very portable programs to be written as a result of careful design such as this.) Another example of abstracting away problems is the work Tim Peters did on optimizing the sort function in Python. The python-dev email thread on the testing that went into making the function robusts is a facinating dialog between some very impressive programmers. The final result is a sort function that does not fail miserably and achieves very good performance when given almost sorted data.
While some leaks can still be found in Python, there plumbers are busy working on fixing them all. One of the current big headache is making Unicode characters appear to be a natural part of the Python language. There are some dark corners in the Unicode specification that makes it difficult to create an efficient implementation of a Unicode string abstraction, but the language developers are working hard to patch up the shortcomings of the underlying libraries and present a more pleasent experience to the Python language user.
The attention to detail by the language implementors is what make Python such a joy to use. Programming in the language is always fun and never a chore.
The Secretary of State of Rhode Island paid a consultant less than $8,000 to develop a website for submitting state regulations to the secretary's office. The regulations are submitted by the agencies through a web form. The form requires them to enter some meta information about the document and then attach the pdf of the regulation. The form processing software passes the pdf file though pdftotext and pushes the text into a MySQL database. The the general public can search all state regulations through a web interface. The implementation was trival. The consultant used MySQL to search the documents and find all the relevant documents.
The maintenance cost of this site is very low, but the request for additional features will probably soak up some additional funding. There are plans to add a freshmeat like feature to the site where individuals can ask to be notified any time a new regulation comes out that matches a query.
Examiners have no incentive to find against an application and they are assigned both the task of finding prior art and judging on the novelty of the new art.
Split the process in two. One group receives new patent applications and is paid a bounty for finding relevant prior art. They get paid based on how accurate they are in finding relevant prior art and an added bonus for every application that gets turned down as a result of the findings.
The person who is to judge the appropriateness of the prior art would follow guidelines on comparing the submitted patent with the pior art package that was discovered by the PTO search team.
Other reforms that seem obvious included extending the prior art searches to include using Google and other Internet based search tools. Searching the patent database only finds prior patent applications. Not every invention is patented, in fact, until recently most Internet based inventions, such as FTP, SMTP, HTTP, DNS, IP, TCP, UDP, etc. were not patented, yet they are fundamental principles that are applied in many recent patents.
Any software patent needs to be submitted with an implementation of the sytem in an operational computer language. Let's pick one so the examiners don't have to learn them all. I nominate Python. It's easy to learn, and it looks like pseudocode. Most likely the patent will look trivial if it is submitted in Python and will be rejected based on not being novel:-)
Basically any good system need to be designed with a feedback loop that keeps the process between the rails. When the patent office switched from giving incentive for denighing applications to giving bonuses for the number of patents awarded they broke the feedback loop. In fact they started applying positive feeback and the system hit the upper rail almost immediately. If they had more patent examiners they'd just produce more bad patents.
Decreasing the likelyhood of a bad patent being approved will discourage people form applying for all but the most likely to be approved patents. Rejecting poorly worded as being unlikely to work because they are not clearly defined would be a first start. There is a simple test. If the instructions in the patent do not make it obvious how to build the patent to someone expert in the art then it should be rejected as being not implementable, like a perpetual motion machine.
And can we get a few more of the applications rejected simply on the grounds that they are obvious to someone who is expert in the arts!! Patents like the "one click" patent is not an invention of a novel device. It is the application of basic software engineering to a specific problem. Give the same problem to 100 skilled engineers and you might have 25 of them come up with the same end design. That is a clear sign that something is obvious.
Finally, recoding a business process "as implemented using a computer" is not inventing something new. It is the same business process, it simply replaces paper with electrons and photons
In response to my comments about Python being a good XML processing language you wrote:
Python still can't match Java for XML developement.
JAXP Java API for XML parsing. JAXM Java API for XML messaging. JAXM Java API for XML Registries JAX-RPC Java API for XML-based RPC SAAJ SOAP with Attachments API for Java JAXB Java API for XML binding.
Python has a similar collection of libraries for processing XML. You missed the point. I was suggesting people look at Python because Java has fewer capabilities as a language than Python. For instance, the set of built in types is limited. And, as with C++, Java isn't completely object oriented.The primitive types are not objects, as they are in Python. For instance, here is an example of string object with a string method called on that object.
Python 2.3a0 (#1, Jun 15 2002, 15:12:54) [GCC 2.96 20000731 (Red Hat Linux 7.3 2.96-110)] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> "The cow jumped over the moon".find("jump") 8 >>>
Also, the Python language is being improved by the open source community. It's growth isn't hampered by corporate interest. With the release of Python 2.2 the meta programming interface was added and work began on class/type convergence. The meta programming capability enables the core Python object model to be customized from within the language.The type/class convergence has made it possible to derive subtypes from builtin types int, list, dict, or str.
This isn't to say that people cannot be productive using Java. The huge library of software available for Java makes short work of some problems. The purpose of my post was to point out a good book on XML processing and to suggest that Python might be of interest to anyone doing XML processing.
An alternative book to consider would be
Definitive XML Application Development by
Lars Marius Garshol. Python is not limited to the object oriented programming style of Java. It is the selective blending of alternative programming styles, such as functional programming, that make Python a better choice than Java for many applications. Processing XML is one such example. Numeric (think steering large physics programs)computing is another. Scripting animation for the movie industry is another.
Python isn't hyped as much as Java. This has had a positive effect on the quality of books written about the language. You don't have to plow through hundreds of bad books when looking for a good book on the language. The referenced Python book had the following description on Amazon.
In this book, leading XML developer Lars Marius Garshol covers every essential aspect of XML programming, from basic principles through advanced techniques, utilizing DOM, SAX, XSLT, XPath, schemas, and other key XML standards. Garshol presents scores of code examples based on Python, a cross-platform language that is exceptionally well suited for XML development. Garshol also presents new insights into XML application design and optimization, as well as complete sample applications.
When a software product is sold, it represents the efforts of a diverse team of individuals. The revenue from software compensates engineers, graphic artists, database programmers,hardware specialists, debuggers and a multitude of contractors, partners and vendors.
In the U.S., the software sector accounted for approximately 319 million jobs in 2001 (see Appendix 8). Software development usually reflects very thin operating budgets and small margins for mistakes. Even after a software application is released, it is often not profitable until its second or third version. The developer must finance both the initial development phase and later modifications. Modifications
This is interesting, approximately 111% of the U.S. population is employed in the software sector.
According to the BLS Computer and Mathematical Occupations employ 2,932,810 total employment. Of those 374k are employeed in the development or the customization of applications.
Re:Perl's had it's day - It's become like COBOL
on
Apocalypse 5 Released
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· Score: 1
There is nothing you can do in Perl that you can't do in Python. And at least in Python it will be reasonably easy to maintain the code after the programmer has died.
The original Python cgi module has been eclipsed by the Zope sever, but the basic concept is the same. (The original cgi module still works. Python generally preserves backwards compatibility.) A web form and the action it is programmed to execute is nothing more than a method call to an object server. The Zope extensions to the server model gracefully adds revision control, the complexity of authorization confirmation, and other capabilities necessary for large server deployments.
It doesn't matter if you are writing a Perl, PHP, Python, or Awk script. If it is a GET or POST request it is a method call against a web sever that is asking for data to be returned by an object server. Some languages focus on making it easier to understand the client-server relationship and some languages make it easier to understand the system as a whole. Python does both reasonably well.
I got the following reasoning for PTO changing to MS Office from a PTO patent examiner in a bar one night. My experience leads me to believe that this the following was at least partially true regarding the PTO. Above the PTO level is speculation on my part.
The Patent and Trademark Office has 6000+ examiners using WordPerfect. Since the Director's office of the agency uses MS Office (they switched to MS Office so it would be easier to communicate with the Secretary of Commerce office, which uses MS Office (they switched because the White House uses MS Office)) the head of the agency set a policy that all of the PTO would be switched to MS Office to help facilitate communications. Trouble is, the PTO had invested a bunch of money in building up very complex macros in WordPerfect. These macros were used in millions of documents that examiners write in response to patent applications.
So if the reason the White House switched to MS Office is because Al Gore, the technology guru of the White House, is buddies with Bill Gates then can we safely say that the trickle down of MS Office to all agencies, regardless of value to the Nation, is the result of a politician's favoritism for a high profile megalomaniac.
I've got to run now, so this is kind of crudely written.
Oops, hit the submit button by mistake. This version has a few corrections.
The Zope web site lists serveral Zope Hosting Providers. Ask one of these ISPs to install the Squishdot product and you can have have a ready-made slashdot up and running in
Oops, hit the submit button by mistake. This version has a few corrections.
The Zope web site lists serveral Zope Hosting Providers. Ask one of these ISPs to install the Squishdot product and you can have have a ready-made slashdot up and running in no time. If you need something more complex you can buy the premium service and install your own custom built products.
The Zope web site lists serveral vendors that provide zope services. The premium service allows you to add your own Zope products to their site. If you have them install the Squishdot product you will have a ready-made slashdot up and running in no time.
The "published objects" technology of Zope is a better example to give as a replacement for CGI. I won't reproduct their documents here. Go to http://www.zope.org/ for the details.
Very cool stuff can be done using Zope capabilities such as XML-RPC
The paper "What's wrong with Perl" describes the shortcomings of Perl. Yes, you can write OO code in Perl, but it sure is ugly. Python is a much more coherent syntax than Perl. Not nearly as many special cases.
Regarding the need to add a switch statement, you are probably not thinking in OO terms if you need to use a switch. Each object should understand how to react to the state rather than have the state used to determine what object to use next. For simple decisions a series of if - elif - else statements will perform the functionality if you don't want to build objects. If there are too many options then just build a dictionary and use the returned value from the dictionary as the action of the switch.
The nice thing about the design of the Python language is that it pushes the programmer to quickly move to using objects rather than lingering on with procedural code. Perl's OO interface is just the opposite. It discourages building objects by making them difficult to construct. (The referenced paper demonstrates this through an example.) So Perl actually is discouraging writing better code. All those bells and whistles built into the core language are great for the quicky 25 line script, but they it just doesn't scale.
The minimalist design of the Python may crimp your style, but that is a design goal. The sparse syntax of Python forces all Python programs to look pretty much like the same person write the code. That tends to make even the worst programmer write better code.
Grail is pretty much dead. Hopefully the Mozilla project eventually replaces javascript with Python as the internal configuration language. It's a great match and Python would make it much easier to integrate the Mozilla widgets with external technologies, such as SQL data bases or graphics engines such as OpenGL or ghostscript.
Slashdot Mirror
More information on the concept of Personal Rapid Transit sytems is available here for your enjoyment. The The Advanced Transit Association is an industry organization with many members from the PRT industry. The organization has a History of Personal Rapid Transit available.
There is a very real discrimination against people who drink acohol. Some people are very capable of safely driving while at a 0.7 to 1.4 range and others who are stone sober should never be allowed behind the wheel. In some cases they simply don't understand the laws of physics. In other cases they are agressive or self absorbed people who thing they have a right to violate traffic laws when they are inconvenient.
The laws simply do not take into consideration the ability of the driver.Why can't I be qualified to drive with a 1.2 blood alcohol content? I'd pay a premium for the privilage, but I have no such option for being tested for this special skill.
The laws regading driving with children do not have such a bias. I'm scared to death of a soccer mom with a van full of teenagers. First, they don't know how to drive a large vehicle. Second, they are always in a rush and violate more traffic laws than any other group I've seen on the road. the laws are designed to punish behaviors which are disliked (drinking) but not to punish as harshly those behaviors that are tolerated (using cell phones and transporting kids to participate in social activities).
Prior driving records should be given much more weight in the case of driving offences. Like many people I know, I have had no moving violations in over ten years, and yet this has nothing to do with whether I have had a drink before getting behind the wheel.In contrast, I have a friend who never drinks, yet she has had so many accidents that the insurance company almost canceled her coverage. Which one of us is the greater danger to society when behind the wheel?
Let me make it clear that I don't think repeated offendors should be treated the same as those who have demonstrated their ability to make good driving judgements. I know of one person who was involved in a single care accident after he had been drinking. The passenger was killed in the accident. He had at least one prior conviction on a DUI. In the prior convition he had been driving over 70 MPH in a 30 MPH zone. His license should never have been returned based on this first conviction. He had shown a complete disregard for the law by driving in a very inappropriate manner. The offense was clearly worse because he had been drinking. (I'd say the same thing if he had been using a cell phone at the time.) To quote Dirty Harry, "A man's got to know his limitations."
One final observation for those of us in the USA. The society continues to promote the use of human controlled vehicles as the principle means of transportation. The technology exists for creating a transportation system that does not require people to drive long distances with a human controlling the vehicle. It is time to automate the transportation system (with personal vehicles, not buses and trains where I have to sit in a room with people I don't know) so that people are taken out of the control loop. The last major upgrade to the transportation system was the Interstate Hyway System. Fifty years later it is time to make another major infrastructure investment. The side effect will be a massive public works employment boom that can't be sent off-shore.
MS will never be obtain a cool image as long as the figurehead for the company is a weasily ubergeek.
Silk purse from a sow's ear comes to mind.
Your :-) smiley suggests you don't really believe that macros are necessary in order to create a self-extensible language. In Python you would accomplish self-extension by using the meta-programming interface to the language. There's lots of interesting things that can be done using meta-programming to change the nature of the langauge. I supsect you will fine this technique to be as good as or better than macros for creating modified language characteristics. Tracing errors in Python is certainly much easier than in a macro-infested program.
Being compilable is not always the best way to achieve maximum efficiency in a program. The widespread use of Python in the animation industry and on supercomputers at LLNL suggests that optimization of an application does not require that all code must be written in a compiled language.Sometimes it is better to make efficient use of highly optimized modules that are easily reused. With processors running at 2Ghz it is often more important to maximize the efficiency of the programmer rather than the program.
Most of the heavy lifting in Python is done by code that is written in C. The Python language simply makes it much easier to set up the application to run the C code at top speed.
You have obviously not tried using Python. That's your loss. I have yet to hear of a whitespace bigot who tries Python for a few weeks who doesn't change their position regarding the use of whitespace as a block delimiting mechanism. The degree of the conversion ranges from sheepishly admitting that it works very well, to becoming raving supporters of Python because the feature works so well.
Proper indentation of a program is considered good style in all computer languages, including Perl. It is simply good programming practice to indent consistantly within a program. Python simply requires that good style be used in a program, rather than leave it as an option. This seems to irritate many narrow-minded, lazy, and sloppy programmers who think curly braces are the only proper way to denote blocks of code.
It won't get rid of scam artists who use SPAM, but it will force legitimate businesses that send out SPAM to conform. If the field is present in the header then mail servers could scan the header prior to receiving the entire message. End users could instruct the mail server to selectively filter the SPAM based on the value present in the "UnSolicited" field.
He is letting Perl get in the way of writing clear code. Serveral Python packages are available for processing the stream as it arrives.
The following example from an article by Uche Ogbuji, "Simple XML Processing With elementtree" [1], shows something akin to his perl examples coded using a Python iterator approach. Note that the examples has no regular expressions for recognizing XML syntax. That layer is abstracted out of the object processing. The articles is worth a read if you want to see how easy XML programming can be.
import sys
from elementtree.ElementTree import ElementTree
root = ElementTree(file=sys.argv[1])
#Create an iterator
iter = root.getiterator()
#Iterate
for element in iter:
#First the element tag name
print "Element:", element.tag
#Next the attributes (available on the instance itself using
#the Python dictionary protocol
if element.keys():
print "\tAttributes:"
for name, value in element.items():
print "\t\tName: '%s', Value: '%s'"%(name, value)
#Next the child elements and text
print "\tChildren:"
#Text that precedes all child elements (may be None)
if element.text:
text = element.text
text = len(text) > 40 and text[:40] + "..." or text
print "\t\tText:", repr(text)
if element.getchildren():
#Can also use: "for child in element.getchildren():"
for child in element:
#Child element tag name
print "\t\tElement", child.tag
#The "tail" on each child element consists of the text
#that comes after it in the parent element content, but
#before its next sibling.
if child.tail:
text = child.tail
text = len(text) > 40 and text[:40] + "..." or text
print "\t\tText:", repr(text)
[1]http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/02/ 12/py-xml.html
A better choice would be to go to the astroid belt and drag back a couple choice astroids. The moon's gravity well is shallow compared to earth, but the energy required to retrieve an astroid would be many times less than throwing rocks off the moon. It would takes years to do the round trip, but with ion engines the astroid could be put under constant acceleration for the first half of the trip and then reversed to brake for the end of the trip.
If you are testing something like fibonacci encode in pure Python then yes it will be 100 times slower than C/C++. But if you are doing real world work then you can use the Python library for the most commonly used algorithms, and the libraries are generally well optimized. It's the Batteries Included part of Python that makes it such a productive environment. Optimization is suppose to be the last step in the coding cycle. Get it write in Python first and then recode the bits that are too slow to tolerate in C.
People are using Python for high performance applications. It's all about good software design. If performance was an issue then LLNL wouldn't be using Python to control applications that run for days on supercomputers. Performance isn't an issue because the Python code just sets up the problems to be solved. Python assembles the standard algorithsm and calls them with the appropriate datasets. Also, the Zope server, written in Python, scales to very large web sites because it uses well placed optimization
Absolutely. Once you get beyond text parsing by standadizing the syntax, the goal of a program is to manipulate objects. XML maps very well into object trees and that is why it is commonly processed using Java and Python. If you want the powerful capabilities of a dynamically typed language, with a simple, easy to learn grammer, then you should use Python for processing XML, not Perl. (Perl's object syntax is as obtuse as the rest of the language and offers no advantages over the elegant object model of Python. In fact, Larry Wall borrowed much of the Perl object design from Python. Use the genuine original, not the imitation.) The standard Python library includes a fine package for navigating through XML data and zero text processing code needs to be written to do this. It's objects all the way down.
There is a good article that explains how to use Python generators to process XML content. This is something you will never be able to do as easily in either Java or Perl.
The title is misleading. The device is a multi-chip-module, not a single chip computer. They have packaged a number of chips in a very small package, but it is not a single chip. A MCM will cost more to manufacture than a true single chip computer because it requires a ceramic substrate to be manufactured with very small trace widths connecting the chips that are placed on the substrate.
Some languages, such as Python, have language designers who prefer to plug leaks. They are very conservative about adding features to the core language. Most of the heavy lifting is done in the module and package libraries. One example of a seamless patch to a leak is the file abstraction in Python. The module provides and abstraction that allow the different formats for file names to be abstracted away. The differences between seperator characters on Windows, the Mac, and Unix are hidden from the programmer (They need to use the abstract interface to get this benefit, but the language design allows very portable programs to be written as a result of careful design such as this.) Another example of abstracting away problems is the work Tim Peters did on optimizing the sort function in Python. The python-dev email thread on the testing that went into making the function robusts is a facinating dialog between some very impressive programmers. The final result is a sort function that does not fail miserably and achieves very good performance when given almost sorted data.
While some leaks can still be found in Python, there plumbers are busy working on fixing them all. One of the current big headache is making Unicode characters appear to be a natural part of the Python language. There are some dark corners in the Unicode specification that makes it difficult to create an efficient implementation of a Unicode string abstraction, but the language developers are working hard to patch up the shortcomings of the underlying libraries and present a more pleasent experience to the Python language user.
The attention to detail by the language implementors is what make Python such a joy to use. Programming in the language is always fun and never a chore.
The maintenance cost of this site is very low, but the request for additional features will probably soak up some additional funding. There are plans to add a freshmeat like feature to the site where individuals can ask to be notified any time a new regulation comes out that matches a query.
Examiners have no incentive to find against an application and they are assigned both the task of finding prior art and judging on the novelty of the new art.
Split the process in two. One group receives new patent applications and is paid a bounty for finding relevant prior art. They get paid based on how accurate they are in finding relevant prior art and an added bonus for every application that gets turned down as a result of the findings.
The person who is to judge the appropriateness of the prior art would follow guidelines on comparing the submitted patent with the pior art package that was discovered by the PTO search team.
Other reforms that seem obvious included extending the prior art searches to include using Google and other Internet based search tools. Searching the patent database only finds prior patent applications. Not every invention is patented, in fact, until recently most Internet based inventions, such as FTP, SMTP, HTTP, DNS, IP, TCP, UDP, etc. were not patented, yet they are fundamental principles that are applied in many recent patents.
Any software patent needs to be submitted with an implementation of the sytem in an operational computer language. Let's pick one so the examiners don't have to learn them all. I nominate Python. It's easy to learn, and it looks like pseudocode. Most likely the patent will look trivial if it is submitted in Python and will be rejected based on not being novel:-)
Basically any good system need to be designed with a feedback loop that keeps the process between the rails. When the patent office switched from giving incentive for denighing applications to giving bonuses for the number of patents awarded they broke the feedback loop. In fact they started applying positive feeback and the system hit the upper rail almost immediately. If they had more patent examiners they'd just produce more bad patents.
Decreasing the likelyhood of a bad patent being approved will discourage people form applying for all but the most likely to be approved patents. Rejecting poorly worded as being unlikely to work because they are not clearly defined would be a first start. There is a simple test. If the instructions in the patent do not make it obvious how to build the patent to someone expert in the art then it should be rejected as being not implementable, like a perpetual motion machine.
And can we get a few more of the applications rejected simply on the grounds that they are obvious to someone who is expert in the arts!! Patents like the "one click" patent is not an invention of a novel device. It is the application of basic software engineering to a specific problem. Give the same problem to 100 skilled engineers and you might have 25 of them come up with the same end design. That is a clear sign that something is obvious.
Finally, recoding a business process "as implemented using a computer" is not inventing something new. It is the same business process, it simply replaces paper with electrons and photons
Python 2.3a0 (#1, Jun 15 2002, 15:12:54)
[GCC 2.96 20000731 (Red Hat Linux 7.3 2.96-110)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> "The cow jumped over the moon".find("jump")
8
>>>
Also, the Python language is being improved by the open source community. It's growth isn't hampered by corporate interest. With the release of Python 2.2 the meta programming interface was added and work began on class/type convergence. The meta programming capability enables the core Python object model to be customized from within the language.The type/class convergence has made it possible to derive subtypes from builtin types int, list, dict, or str.
This isn't to say that people cannot be productive using Java. The huge library of software available for Java makes short work of some problems. The purpose of my post was to point out a good book on XML processing and to suggest that Python might be of interest to anyone doing XML processing.
Python isn't hyped as much as Java. This has had a positive effect on the quality of books written about the language. You don't have to plow through hundreds of bad books when looking for a good book on the language. The referenced Python book had the following description on Amazon.
According to the BLS Computer and Mathematical Occupations employ 2,932,810 total employment. Of those 374k are employeed in the development or the customization of applications.
There is nothing you can do in Perl that you can't do in Python. And at least in Python it will be reasonably easy to maintain the code after the programmer has died.
The original Python cgi module has been eclipsed by the Zope sever, but the basic concept is the same. (The original cgi module still works. Python generally preserves backwards compatibility.) A web form and the action it is programmed to execute is nothing more than a method call to an object server. The Zope extensions to the server model gracefully adds revision control, the complexity of authorization confirmation, and other capabilities necessary for large server deployments.
It doesn't matter if you are writing a Perl, PHP, Python, or Awk script. If it is a GET or POST request it is a method call against a web sever that is asking for data to be returned by an object server. Some languages focus on making it easier to understand the client-server relationship and some languages make it easier to understand the system as a whole. Python does both reasonably well.
The Patent and Trademark Office has 6000+ examiners using WordPerfect. Since the Director's office of the agency uses MS Office (they switched to MS Office so it would be easier to communicate with the Secretary of Commerce office, which uses MS Office (they switched because the White House uses MS Office)) the head of the agency set a policy that all of the PTO would be switched to MS Office to help facilitate communications. Trouble is, the PTO had invested a bunch of money in building up very complex macros in WordPerfect. These macros were used in millions of documents that examiners write in response to patent applications.
So if the reason the White House switched to MS Office is because Al Gore, the technology guru of the White House, is buddies with Bill Gates then can we safely say that the trickle down of MS Office to all agencies, regardless of value to the Nation, is the result of a politician's favoritism for a high profile megalomaniac.
I've got to run now, so this is kind of crudely written.
The Zope web site
lists serveral Zope Hosting Providers. Ask one of these ISPs to install the Squishdot product and you can have
have a ready-made slashdot up and running in
The Zope web site lists serveral Zope Hosting Providers. Ask one of these ISPs to install the Squishdot product and you can have have a ready-made slashdot up and running in no time. If you need something more complex you can buy the premium service and install your own custom built products.
The Zope web site lists serveral vendors that provide zope services. The premium service allows you to add your own Zope products to their site. If you have them install the Squishdot product you will have a ready-made slashdot up and running in no time.
better example to give as a replacement for CGI.
I won't reproduct their documents here. Go to
http://www.zope.org/ for the details.
Very cool stuff can be done using Zope capabilities such as XML-RPC
Regarding the need to add a switch statement, you are probably not thinking in OO terms if you need to use a switch. Each object should understand how to react to the state rather than have the state used to determine what object to use next. For simple decisions a series of if - elif - else statements will perform the functionality if you don't want to build objects. If there are too many options then just build a dictionary and use the returned value from the dictionary as the action of the switch.
The nice thing about the design of the Python language is that it pushes the programmer to quickly move to using objects rather than lingering on with procedural code. Perl's OO interface is just the opposite. It discourages building objects by making them difficult to construct. (The referenced paper demonstrates this through an example.) So Perl actually is discouraging writing better code. All those bells and whistles built into the core language are great for the quicky 25 line script, but they it just doesn't scale.
The minimalist design of the Python may crimp your style, but that is a design goal. The sparse syntax of Python forces all Python programs to look pretty much like the same person write the code. That tends to make even the worst programmer write better code.
Grail is pretty much dead. Hopefully the Mozilla
project eventually replaces javascript with
Python as the internal configuration language.
It's a great match and Python would make it much
easier to integrate the Mozilla widgets with
external technologies, such as SQL data bases or
graphics engines such as OpenGL or ghostscript.