Home Original page

opening a text document to show a .txt file through a browserlink

Lemniscate d_blade8 at hotmail.com
Tue Dec 31 14:27:53 EST 2002 
Cliff Wells <clifford.wells at attbi.com> wrote in message news:<mailman.1041312425.5480.python-list at python.org>...
> If you claim that the what was entered on the
> keypad was merely data acted upon by the internal program, then I'll
> argue that your Python code is merely data acted upon by the interpreter
> (which is true, and yet wrong).

An excellent point, and my thoughts in a nutshell.  I'm not taking
sides here, mainly because I think (and I think this thread
illustrates) programming is many things to many people.  If one wants
to ignore mark-up languages (XML and/or HTML) because they are just
data acted on by an interpreter, than C/C++ falls into the same area. 
You must have a well-formatted file, with all the characters in the
right place in order for it to work.  Some things may be done
differently (using iostream vs. stdio, for example so once can use
cout vs. printf), but miss a semicolon or brace, and who knows what'll
happen.  Kind of like building tables in html.  Here's another
example:

print "Hello world"

Save that (with any path info you may need) in a .py file and run it. 
Wow, it says 'Hello world'.  Now try this:

<html>
Hello world
</html>

Save that to a .html file and run it.  Same kind of idea.  Yeah, your
browser has to interpret it, but the same can be said of the py file
above (move it to a computer without python installed and run it and
you'll see what I mean).

Now, I am not saying that everything is programming, nor am i saying
that almost nothing is programming.  All I'm saying is that there are
arguments both ways.

It's kind of like how Scott Adams puts it in a few of his books,
referring to voters.  He asks if all voters are stupid.  He reasons
that, in heated contests, half the voters vote one way while the other
half vote the other way.  They all have access to the same
information, so is one half just stupid?  Okay, what about the next
heated vote?  And the next?  Do people flip-flop being stupid?  He
also says that if everybody were reasonable and intelligent, they
would all look at the data and come to the same conclusion.  One of
the arguments he makes (which he puts under the stupid category) is
that people are predisposed to one idea and refuse to see any other
alternatives (quick aside: I know for a fact that this applies to the
programming world, when my wife decided to learn VB, some of the C
programmers at work gave her grief and told her that VB wasn't even
really programming anyway, since a program did some of the work;  I
wonder now if they compiled their C code by hand, then).  While Scott
Adams obviously was speaking tongue-in-cheek, he brushes near the
point.  Opinion.  Nothing is as important to a person (and as
irrelevant to others) as her own opinion.  There are going to be
differing opinions (I want to hear from whoever has an opinion
contrary to that [logic loop]).  However, I like to hear differing
opinions.  Heck, I've even changed my mind a time or two.  I just say
this because I saw a post or two that seemed to be putting somebody
down for their opinions without giving their arguments the credit they
desired.  Anyway, I've rambled for a while, time to go.

Lem
More information about the Python-list mailing list