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New to Python: Features

Andrew Dalke adalke at mindspring.com
Mon Oct 4 23:26:39 EDT 2004 
Richard Blackwood wrote:
> Hi, I'm new to Python and I'd like to know if Python has the following 
> support: *please answer to each individually, thanks*

Welcome to Python.  I've been using it for almost a decade
and full time for 7 years and quite enjoy it.

However.  You've asked a whole bunch of questions which
look as if you've not done any research on your own.  It
has the feeling almost that you're asking us to do a
homework assignment for you.  Given the question

 > 39. Unicode

it means you haven't even looked at the tutorial at
   http://docs.python.org/tut/tut.html
with its section 3.1.3 "Unicode strings".

much less given a cursory review of the reference manual at
   http://docs.python.org/ref/ref.html

Given your questions about closure, tail recursion,
JIT, prototype-based OOP, etc. you are apparently not
new to programming.  Reading through the base
documentation should be a much better use of your time
and ours than having people answer your questions point
by point.  After all, some of your questions require
non-trivial amounts of contextualization to answer
correctly.  Eg, your #30 assumes a Smalltalk paradigm,
while Python uses a different way to achieve similar
ends, your #28 requires explaining Python's reference
based semantics where variable have only one type,
reference to object, and your #11 requires a stern
warning that such behaviour is almost certainly a
security hole waiting to happen.

The most suspicious part about your post is your
haphazard use of so many different programming
paradigms combined with the almost pedigogical way
of describing some of them.

Please read the basic Python documentation before
asking these questions.

				Andrew
				dalke at dalkescientific.com
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