Python is a good language

[Paul Dufresne]

I am discovering Python! Python is listed on the languages page but
I think it doesn't tell much. Python is an interpreted object
oriented language that borrow many things to other languages like
Modula-3 and Icon. It has a garbage collector (reference counting).
It has a good module system. It implements tuples(records), list
(implemented as arrays) and dictionnaries.  It has taken from Lisp
some functions like map, apply, and lambda functions.  You can
specify slices for index used by lists and strings. That is if
a='computer' a[1:3] -> 'com'  a[:4] -> 'comp' a[-4:] -> 'uter' etc.
It uses indentation to determine blocks of code.

It is free and have the most unrestrictive license I have seen: do
whatever you want, even commercial, as long as you keep copyrights
notices.

But the most important is that many people have made a lots of
libraries for it. These include persistent class, internet stuff
(html, cgi, smtp, ftp, etc.), GUI (Tcl/Tk), ncurses, databases, etc.
Modules can be written in Python, they can be written in an other language
and linked dynamically (Unix), or they can be C files compiled at the same
time as the compiler. There is an interface with C that make it possible to
use those libraries in Python, or to call Python inside of a C program.

So maybe it would make a good language to generate HTML pages based
on a database.


---Paul Dufresne

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