On Apr 3, 2007, at 1:56 PM, Sales Info wrote:
> I'm trying to like Python. Haven't had my "aha" moment yet. Plan on
> downloading the latest Dabo release soon and giving it another try.
I second Ted's comment that Dabo is not the way to learn Python. You
will get so much more out of Dabo if you already know Python.
My 'aha' moment with Python came when I was lamenting the fact that,
well, it just wasn't Fox, and we all know how awesome Fox is,
especially with data. Python just didn't have cursors that I could
manipulate like I could in Fox.
The first part of the 'aha' was when I realized that a Python
dictionary mapped perfectly to a record in a table. That is, a dict
is a collection of values that you access by their keys, while a
record is a collection of values that you access by their column
names. So a Python dict whose keys are the column names, and whose
values are the column values is the same thing.
The second part of the 'aha' was when I made the connection that a
cursor in VFP is nothing more than a series of records with identical
structures, and that if I created a series of Python dicts with
identical structures, that would do the same thing. Python has two
ordered sequence types: lists and tuples. The differences are not
relevant here, but suffice it to say that a VFP cursor can be
represented in Python as a list of dicts.
Python, and other interpreted languages (like Fox, for that matter)
have a largely undeserved reputation for being slow, but one place
that Python is highly optimized is in the area of lists, tuples and
dictionaries - they are wicked fast in practice. This meant that I
could manipulate my Python 'cursors' with the same confidence as I
could in Fox. That's what convinced me that Python was the way to go.
-- Ed Leafe
-- http://leafe.com
-- http://dabodev.com
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