Python is a lot more elegant than xBase in many ways, but then those of us coming from xBase appreciate the continuity.
For example having a ">>> " (chevron) instead of a dot prompt (". ") is superficial whereas what's deep is having REPL in both cases. Ever since APL, I've been biased towards interpreters I could "chat with". xBase came out of Jet Propulsion Labs (CA) as a satellite controller language and was adapted for commercial use as dBase II (initially) surviving through dBase V under Borland, with FoxPro a sister implementation of the same language. Microsoft purchased FoxPro to compete with Borland as in those days many believed xBase in all its flavors, was to be one of three or four pillar languages going forward. FoxPro Advisor was a commercial magazine in stores. I even published an article in it (March 1994). In xBase we had keywords 'scatter' and 'gather' and I find myself using those verbs in explaining * and ** in my work as a Python mentor for O'Reilly School. On the arguments side, *seq makes syntactic sense, as it does on the parameters side (of calling a callable). Likewise **hash_of_stuff: we need to explain these as complementary uses. When you call a function with *seq as your argument, you're "scattering" a sequence ("exploding it") into positionals, whereas with def F(*seq): as a parameter, you're "gathering" ("imploding") positionals coming in. Ditto with dicts: scatter a dict into keyword arguments on the calling side (**d is an argument), gather incoming keyword arguments into a dict when called (**d is a parameter). Ed Leafe is another VFP (Visual FoxPro) refugee I meet at Pycons and OSCONs. Ed worked on Dabo to help VFP developers continue on in Python. I met another brilliant guy here in Portland, Jim Heuer, (I worked for him briefly some years back), who juggles Python, VFP and C all in one major SaaS application that routes trucks all over. He's a transportation engineer and a spry software developer. VFP attracted a lot of talented coders in my experience. Microsoft is discontinuing its support of VFP this year. No migration to 64-bit architecture planned. No next edition in the pipeline. That's partly why we're getting a lot of refugees in Python World. Microsoft maybe hoped to shepherd these refugees to Visual Basic perhaps, but no VFP progammer I know likes VB all that much (xBase was so superior to BASIC all along). That leaves other .NET platforms but C# is so low level. We can speculate as to how the diaspora will pan out. Some may just keep using VFP anyway as just because Microsoft no longer loves it does not mean one must abandon ship just yet. Maybe time to get the life rafts ready? Kirby Links: http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?116057-substitue-for-scatter-memavr-and-gather-memvar-of-foxpro-in-vb http://dabodev.com/ https://mail.python.org/pipermail/portland/2015-January/001663.html
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