On 9/28/18 7:39 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
On Fri, Sep 28, 2018 at 07:18:54PM +0200, 2qdxy4rzwzuui...@potatochowder.com
wrote:
On 9/28/18 12:45 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
On Tue, Sep 25, 2018 at 09:59:53PM +1000, Hugh Fisher wrote:
C and Python (currently) are known as simple languages.
o_O
That's a usage of "simple" I haven't come across before. Especially in
the case of C, which is a minefield of *intentionally* underspecified
behaviour which makes it near to impossible for the developer to tell
what a piece of syntactically legal C code will actually do in practice.
s/C/Python/
s/underspecified/dynamic/
;-)
I see the wink, but I don't see the relevance. Are you agreeing with me
or disagreeing?
I agree that Hugh's use of "simple" is unfamiliar.
I disagree that C is is a bigger offender than Python when it comes to a
developer telling what a piece of syntactically legal code will actually
do in practice. If that's not what you meant by "Especially in the case
of C...," then I mis-interpreted or read too much into your wording.
Python is "simple" in the sense that the execution model is *relatively*
simple, but its not a minimalist language by any definition. And as you
say, the execution model is dynamic: we can't be sure what legal code
will do until you know the runtime state.
That's my point: What you emphasized about C can be applied equally to
Python. In C, it's because the standard is intentionally
underspecified; in Python, it's y because the language is intentionally
dynamic.
When you said "underspecified," I didn't make the leap to "undefined
behaviour" (although I think I know from past experience how you feel
about C and its undefined behaviour). Instead, I jumped to things like
the ambiguity in the size of an int, or the freedom the compiler has to
pack/align struct values or implement integers as something other than
two's complement.
(Although we can often guess, based on assumptions about sensible,
non-weird objects that don't do weird things.)
Again, the same is true of C. In Python, weird objects might override
getattr; in C weird objects might point to hardware registers, or depend
on implementation specific detail(s).
But none of that compares to C undefined behaviour. People who think
that they are equivalent, don't understand C undefined behaviour.
Well, yes: Some syntactically legal C results in nasal demons, and some
of that code is harder to spot than others. AFAIK, syntactically legal
Python can only do that if the underlying C code invokes undefined
behaviour.
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