[TUHS] Re: python

[Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com>]

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I think it's again helpful to consider golang as "roughly as modern as
Python, but definitely more C-inspired".

The thing that Python f-strings do (other than allow interpolation of
arbitrary code to be executed, which can be very handy) is that they
generally provide a sane default representation of the value you want.  For
instance, you can say:

print(f"Value of foo == {foo}") and you get either something sane if foo is
a primitive type, or you get whatever foo's __str__() method gives you if
it's an instance of a class; the default class general does something
not-terrible with that, but you can add __str__() and __repr__() if you
have opinions about how you want to represent your class when printed for
humans or for machine consumption (effectively, __repr__() should let you
reconstruct the object, while __str__() is for display to humans).

This overcomes something C doesn't easily let you do.  Most of the time I'd
rather not have to care whether the thing I'm printing is a string, or a
pointer, or an integer, or whatever: I just want to see its value.

Go has %v for exactly this.  It's very nice for debugging.

On Fri, Aug 4, 2023 at 1:15 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> Perhaps it is a stretch, but I'd say that printf() is a good example of
> the type of thinking done by the original Unix folks.  Seeing how other
> people didn't learn that lesson kind of underscores the good engineering
> done at Bell Labs.
>
> On Fri, Aug 04, 2023 at 04:11:02PM -0400, Noel Chiappa wrote:
> > How is discussing Python's output options related to the history of Unix?
> >
> >       Noel
>
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing
> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
>

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