As someone who learned C first, when I came to Python everytime I read about a new feature it was like, "Whoa! I can do that?!" Slicing, dir(), getattr/setattr, the % operator, all of this was very different from C.
I'm curious -- what is everyone's favorite trick from a non-python language? And -- why isn't it in Python? Here's my current candidate: So the other day I was looking at the language Lua. In Lua, you make a line a comment with two dashes: -- hey, this is a comment. And you can do block comments with --[[ and ---]]. --[[ hey this is a big comment --]] This syntax lets you do a nifty trick, where you can add or subtract a third dash to change whether or not code runs: --This code won't run because it's in a comment block --[[ print(10) --]] --This code will, because the first two dashes make the rest a comment, breaking the block ---[[ print(10) --]] So you can change whether or not code is commented out just by adding a dash. This is much nicer than in C or Python having to get rid of """ or /* and */. Of course, the IDE can compensate. But it's still neat :) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
