Python-URL! - 1998/11/02

by Cameron Laird - DejaNews: [1]

The next couple of weeks are likely to be even less objective than usual, as the editor turns his attention from newsgroup exegesis to Conference tourguiding.

• Has a question about Python been burning in your brain? Is there something you wish Guido would explain? He invites you to realize that fantasy (see DN405964455)
• Highlighting a long-running discussion of docstrings (thread [2]) are Henk Jansen's announcement of his "Python Online Help" project (see DN405326291) and Tim Peters' anticipation of more widespread standardization after 1.5.2 (see DN404752055)
• "If only Python had an IDE ...," posters frequently lament. Yuri Mironoff distributes c-forge in both no-charge and for-money flavors. Oliver Andrich and others discuss its merits (thread [3]) Meanwhile, Rober Pyron supplies Python chromacoding for Codewright (see DN405415822) many developers compare *emacs, SitePadPro, and *vi* experiences under NT (thread [4]) (thread [5]) and Tim Hochberg goes so far as to explain use of Ptui and Pythonwin as consoles (see DN405629589)
• Bernhard Herzog explains how he thinks about vectors as sequences in building-in (with C) example extended objects (see DN405907460)
• With little provocation, Tim Peters packs most of the canonical performance wisdom, including "Python pushes late binding to an extreme," and "fast enough?", into a single follow-up (see DN407332341)
• As painful as it to draw attention to a "... language war ..." thread, last month's (thread [6]) included such Python-specific highlights as Ivan Van Laningham's personal testimony of comparative development anatomy (see DN405340491) Andrew Dalke's nice illustration of exception programming (see DN407236113) and Gordon McMillan's marketing plan (see DN406171126)
• For Pythoneers, "hack" means something on the level of reconstituting functional semantics, distinguishing closures from their lexical correlates, lazy evaluation, functorization, element anonymity, that sort of thing, with appropriate references to original work by Kay, Sussman, ... (thread [7])