Re: Python/zsh/perl [was: named directory expansion on strings]

[Vincent Stemen <zsh@hightek.org>]

On Sun, Mar 14, 2004 at 06:54:37PM +0000, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> On Mar 13,  6:48pm, Thorsten Kampe wrote:
> : |         print ${(r.$JUSTIFY.):-"${ltred}! ${white}..."
> 
> You don't need $JUSTIFY there: (r.JUSTIFY.) is sufficient, because the
> expression is interpreted in math context where all non-keywords are
> variable references.
> 
> : Long live the Zen of Python[2].
> 
> Hrm.  As far as I'm concerned, the Python folks went wrong when they gave
> semantic significance to depth of whitespace indentation, and all of the
> right decisions they've made since have been a waste of effort.

I agree.  This surprising discovery is the primary reason I never put
any serious consideration into learning Python.  Seems like it would
be a nightmare to fix if you get your indentation messed up (which is
extremely common when juggling code around).  Also, I use the auto
indentation features of xemacs all the time.  I see no way you could
do that without code block delimiters.  Seems like a step backward in
time.

As long as I am here, I thought I would use the opportunity to give
you Z shell developers some more positive feedback :-).

I was very pleased to find that you can do direct array indexing of
single dimensional arrays in zsh.  ie. if x=abcd, then $x[2] = b.
That very feature is most commonly the weakness of tradition shell
script and even Perl that sometimes ends up causing me to write a
routine as an external C program when I am writing a complex script.

As wonderful of a language as Perl is, that is the one limitation I
have found that gives Z shell an advantage, even over Perl, in
situations where that lower level control is needed.  In Perl, it is
far to much unnecessary overhead to split a string on every character,
into a two dimensional array of strings, using the null delimiter, just
gain access to a specific byte of the array.  Then, if you modify the
array, you must re-join the data back into a single string.  All that,
as opposed to just being able to say "$array[$i] = 'x'".

This is about the only complaint I can think of I have ever really had
with Perl.

-- 
Vincent Stemen
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