in 762282 20160711 063300 Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: >On Monday 11 July 2016 13:07, Rustom Mody wrote: > >> Python is good for black-box â us the âbatteries includedâ without >> worrying >> too much how they are made >> Scheme, assembly language, Turing machines etc are at the other end of the >> spectrum > >I would put it the other way. > >Python is excellent for "white boxes", because the syntax is extremely >approachable, easy to read and comprehend. (Although you may wish to avoid some >of the more complicated and hairy features if your emphasis is on learning.) >It's famous for being "executable pseudo-code" and neither too concise nor too >verbose, and lacks the syntactic cruft which can impede understanding (braces, >type declarations), which makes it excellent for teaching about algorithms, >etc. But for some tasks, at least, it may lack speed and efficiency to be a >practical "black box". > >Scheme, assembly, C, Forth etc are excellent for black boxes, as they are >extremely efficient languages, but not so approachable, readable and >comprehensible. > >Turing machines are to be avoided except for academic proofs that a certain >feature or language is equivalent to a Turing machine, in which case we know >precisely how much power it has, computation-wise. Turing machines are neither >efficient enough to be used as black boxes, nor comprehensible enough to be >used for white boxes. > >Take Python's StringIO class. Would you rather *read* the Python version or the >C version? Which would you rather *use*?
The Rexx version :-))
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