On Tue, 12 May 2015 06:48 am, Mel Wilson wrote: > On Tue, 12 May 2015 02:35:23 +1000, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > >> On Mon, 11 May 2015 11:37 pm, Mel Wilson wrote: >> >>> On Sun, 10 May 2015 14:12:44 -0500, boB Stepp wrote: >>> >>>> I have to admit being surprised by this, too. I am just now studying >>>> on how to write my own classes in Python, and have come to realize >>>> that doing this is *possible*, but the *surprise* to me is why the >>>> language design allowed this to actually be done. >>> >>> Read Cory Doctorow lately on the War Against General Purpose Computing, >>> where a bunch of people who don't really understand are trying to make >>> it impossible for any computer to do something that is The Wrong Thing. >> >> I think you are conflating two different ideas of "the Wrong Thing". > > I don't think so. A formal solution to a problem, i.e. a solution coded > as a computer program, is limited to the things that can be done using > formal techniques. Whether it's people trying to enact their social > standards in code, or whether it's people trying to nail the door shut > against everything they "don't expect", or "think is illogical", the > limits will still be there.
Do you think that Python is part of Doctorow's war against general purpose computing because it doesn't have a GOTO command? Do you think that using Python reduces your control over your computer because Python code has well-defined integer overflow behaviour? When you have had a bug in your code, and Python has raised an exception with a nice traceback and an informative error message, how many times have you thought "I wish Python would just seg fault"? -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list