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We battled those demons and sent them packing! OK a lot of stuff was written in COBOL because there was assembly and COBOL, COBOL gave you an error message, assembly didn't.
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:shudder:
Not to diss on COBOL, but after thirty+ years I still remember having to help a fellow college student debug a COBOL program which wasn't working.
She had used TABs to pad a string to the desired length -- it looked OK on a VT100, but the compiler knew better.
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That's my main problem with Python as well. Tabs? Spaces? Who knows?
Source code should not be invisible. I will make a grudging exception for line based grammars like Visual BASIC. At least that's manageable.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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David Crow wrote: glennPattonWork3 wrote:...but syntactic white space 'align your tabs'It's like COBOL or RPG. 
With 1 very important difference. With only assembler to build from and the extremely limited capabilities of computers when those languages were designed, rigid assignment of columns of code for specific purposes wasn't an unreasonable choice to make things easier for the compiler and compiler authors and was a major step forward from the prior state of the art.
The chuckle![Elephant | [mastadon]](https://codeproject.freetls.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/elephant.gif) s guilty of designing python have no such excuse.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
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Dan Neely wrote: The chuckle[mastadon] s guilty of designing python have no such excuse.
I was there when C pushed out Pascal (and Algol and Simula and ...). Lots of programmers argued in favor of C because they hated all the typing of BEGIN and END (and in some languages CASE - ESAC, DO - OD and PROCEDURE - ERUDECORP). I met lots of programmers who insisted that replacing keywords with braces speeded up their programming.
Besides, they argued: All those keywords clutter up the program code. C, using braces for delimiters, is much cleaner, they insisted.
Python is just taking this one step further. Why should you have to type a delimiter, if you indent the code? Why clutter up you code with braces? Besides: Using both delimiters and indentation opens for inconsistencies: You could be using a brace without indenting, and the reader might overlook it, or indenting without a brace, leading the reader to think that the indented code makes up a block. If you use indentation only, you avoid such problems.
That is how the arguments go. Most modern programmers never wrote a compiler, not even a parser, an in any case, using indents for identifying blocks is not, and has never been, a resource saver. So that argument is never heard.
I hope that I do not appear as if I am supporting these arguments! I am certainly not. I am much in favor of making structures very explicit. I want the compiler to check that redundant elements (like indent and textual markers) correspond, and to check that the label on the block close matches than of the block opening. I am definitely not a Python lover.
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It seems to be logical that adding these { } to Python with the same semantics as in C would save Python from a lot of criticism ... Like in Cython, where static typing has been added. AFAIK there is also syntax in Python to indicate variable types, but there is nothing done yet with this weird block structure ...  . Is this feasible (?), perhaps not ... I am dreaming about Python 4.x with { } it's TIOBE rating would probably skyrocket ...
modified 5-Apr-23 14:52pm.
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As trønderen stated above, with braces whitespace becomes more or less immaterial and so it is, for the most part, with Java, C#, C, C++, etc. And that leads to not having to indent when structuring your code.
I was always led to believe that one of the reasons Python made whitespace significant was to enforce "proper" code structure and now all those ugly 2-finger-typed brace characters can be eliminated. In a sense, they actually are there, they're just invisible - and therein lies the rub (at least to braceophiles like me).
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Yes, I agree ... I even do not notice anymore how I type them  . I got so much used to them that code without them seems odd (and my brain is warning me - this won't work, so I get in persistent confusion when looking at standard Python code). Also, the missing ; in some languages' code bugs me a lot ... It seems that in Go it is implicit, for some strange reason ... (there is always a good reason for something like this of course )
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Oh ![Green Alien | [Alien]](https://codeproject.global.ssl.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/alien.gif) I hope so...
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There just something about **Value, my brain says 'Pointer to a pointer, what witchcraft is this!!!'
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Never had a problem yet with pip. 
I did say "yet", which probably means trouble the next time I use it.
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You've not had the:
Package A needs version < X of Package B
Package C needs version > X of package B
Package D needs Package A and Package C
/bangs head on desk
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Chris Maunder wrote: good luck with PIP
Peripheral Interchange Program? I haven't used that since my PDP-11 days.
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Using a programming language named after a snake (a constrictor, no less) is maybe a sign.
"the devil made me do it"
I do not use python for the reasons mentioned (invisible code, tab and space blindness, etc.)
I do use other's python code as pseudo code, of sorts, for C.
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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To be perfectly honest I think the retail price of Python has more to do with it popularity than anything else.
Remember you get what you pay for. 
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Granted, the "price is right". Python is very handy for one-off kind of stuff. I am using it to debug/tune Chris's CP-AI used with Blue Iris, mostly BI settings. Watch for a change in the BI log, filter it with what I am looking for and send me an SMS. Handy to get a heads up so as to check out the event. Maybe trivial, but handy. Also use it from time to time as a syslog server when looking for people trying to access sites they don't belong on using the corp LAN. Cleanup after ransomware is no fun.
Now, this payroll program I an writing with Python is more of a struggle. 
An intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of the Lone Ranger.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
>64
Some days the dragon wins. Suck it up.
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Ok, so, I'm going to give you the single best use-case for bothering with Python.
Jupyter Notebooks.
It's a webserver-based environment to document, script, and generate results in a single document.
You can transform notebooks into slides, so you can teach a class.
You can effectively collab with people on notebooks, so you can do research across the globe.
You can generate and plot all manner of graphs, so you can use it to prove something.
There's markup and HTML support if you need it.
Anything else --> don't use Python
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Finished the tutorial I had to do, I can say it gets around some problems (& creates it own) but there never issues I have had I mean 'you can create a web server in two lines', a good 90% of the code I have written is embedded (except a few test rig software front ends), by embedded I mean small memory, limited output and tends to be mounted in a hole under ground or under water. So web is not an issue...
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As an added bonus... it's also slow.
Jeremy Falcon
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'But thats not an issue with modern PCs' try running it a PC104 that a few years old...
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It depends on the application. If everybody thought that way, even modern PCs would run slower than they need to... which they do. There's seldom a good reason to make an use a slow language unless A: there's no other option and B: it introduces some radically new concept. People are just lazy and would rather not learn how to do things the best way, so we get crap like this.
Jeremy Falcon
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Genius has one brain cell changed (10)
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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