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Python arrays and sting formatting options

bearophileHUGS at lycos.com bearophileHUGS at lycos.com
Thu Oct 2 21:15:59 EDT 2008 
Steven D'Aprano:
> With Python 3.0, GvR had the
> opportunity to strip Python of all the features that makes Python easy to
> learn, and he didn't. Python still has features that are easy for
> newbies, and features that are powerful for experienced coders, and that
> friendliness for newbies isn't going away. That's a good thing.

I think that making range, dict.keys, dict.values, filter, map, etc,
return lazy iterables GvR has made the language a little less easy to
understand for newbies.

What's a range(n)? A function that returns a list of n items, from 0
to n. This is easy to understand, while xrange(n) is a bit less easy
to understand (a generator or generators).

Python is growing toward being more fit for medium-large programs, and
less fit for being small, simple and easy. Lua for example is now
maybe better than Python if you need something light to script a large
C++ program, so the niche partially left free by Python that has gone
"up" is being partially replaced by Lua.

Bye,
bearophile
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