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Python not a Very High-Level Language?

Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes kamikaze at kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu
Mon Jan 3 03:07:46 EST 2000 
31 Dec 1999 13:48:06 GMT: in <84ic6m$ao9$1 at news1.xs4all.nl>,
boud at rempt.xs4all.nl spake:
>Ajith Prasad <aprasad at magix.com.sg> wrote:
>> http://www.oreilly.com/news/vhll_1299.html is an article by Greg Wilson
>But even so, he doesn't mention good stuff like the ways you can nowadays
>combine code and documentation (as in Qt), or work with diagrams. Class
>browsers already exist (even though I find most of them more confusing
>than helpful). It's only the presentation that's lacking, I think. But
>for that you don't need in intermediary language, although that would
>come in handy to make one environment work for more than one language.

  There's a much simpler way to achieve his purported goal: Java's
javadoc comments allow you to embed HTML, including image tags,
hotlinks, links to other javadocs with @see, formal descriptions of the
parameters and return types of your methods, and a great number of other
features...  And they're just plaintext comments, so you can still edit
your code with vi.

  Some form of this would definitely be a Good Thing for Python to
adopt.  I already use the javadoc format in my Python code, even though
I can't actually use the javadoc tool to make web pages from it.

  If you WANT a really high-tech editor, you could presumably make one
that interactively interprets javadocs as you're reading the code, but I
suspect that most programmers still use a plaintext editor on files of
source code for one excellent reason: It's the fastest way to get our
thoughts from our brains to the computer.

  Smalltalk attempted to make us all more efficient by using an
overarching IDE that did all the fancy stuff possible at the time
(mostly that damned annoying class browser), and it was, IMO, a complete
and utter pain in the ass when you actually wanted to write code.

  Someone else mentioned a folding editor - the old GFA Basic (it was a
structured variant with editor-ENFORCED indentation-as-control but also
keywords) editor/IDE (originally for the Atari ST, but it was ported to
PCs and Amiga) had function folding that operated on a single keypress
in that function...  This made reading and studying big programs MUCH
easier, because you could see the overview of all functions available,
then look inside any one you wanted quickly.  There have been
threatening noises in the function folding direction from vim lately,
too.

  The author's garbage-collection comments are too low-level a detail
for my current almost-intermediate-level Python knowledge, but if true,
that's something that should definitely be fixed, but it's hardly an
issue of high- or low-level.

-- <a href="http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/"> Mark Hughes </a>
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