Paul Rubin wrote:
But how, in Lisp, would you transliterate the Python list [1, 2, 3, 4]? Clearly the Python list *is* different, and the tradeoff was to obtain speed of random access, presumably (I wasn't taking an interest in Python in its early days) anticipating that non-recursive algorithms would be the norm.Tim Peters <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Huh? [1,2,[3,4,5],[6,[[[[7]],8]]]] is a perfectly valid Python list.
You're claiming not to know any relevant difference between Python lists and Lisp lists? Heh.
Python doesn't provide syntactic sugar for [1,[2,[3,[4,[]]]]] if that's what you mean. In Lisp you'd say (1 2 3 4). It's still a perfectly valid list in Python. Python by convention uses multi-element arrays instead of lists of conses.
Well, I blush to say I have done that (once, if my memory serves me correctly), but it was an ugly program, and I did eventually refactor the code so that the loops were in separate scopes, which made it much cleaner.
And you can break out of a containing loop from a nested loop with try/raise.
Heh heh. Yes, you can. I've never seen a real Python program that
did, but there's nothing to stop you.> I do that on a fairly routine basis. I won't say "often", but it's a standard technique that finds a use now and then.
[...]
There's a technique in numerical analysis called Richardson extrapolation, where you compute an integral by [...]
Wow. Anyone who feels the need to explain numerical analysis techniques to Tim Peters is wasting keystrokes big-time. Anyway, Richardson extrapolation is merely one of many successive approximation techniques, which is what you are talking about, no?
I see the same thing happening in Python. It's going through successively better approximations to get closer to a limit. Python has it harder than some other languages, because it tries to serve the needs of both throwaway scripts and large-scale development projects. The result is that feature after feature starts out with an implementation sufficient for small scripts, and then edges towards the needs of large-scale projects. But it's often predictable at the beginning what the final destination is going to be. So once we can see where it's going, why not proceed to the finish line immediately instead of bothering with the intermediate steps?
Perhaps because we don't all have your psychic powers?
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