On 2022-03-04 23:47:09 +0000, Avi Gross via Python-list wrote:
> I am not sure a reply is needed, Peter, and what you say is true. But
> as you point out, when using a German keyboard, I would already have
> a way to enter symbols like ä, ö, ü and ß and no reason not to include
> them in variable names and so on if UNICODE is being used properly. I
> can use my last name in German notation as a variable in Python now:
>
> Groß = 144
> Groß / 12
> 12.0

Yes, I'm using umlauts occasionally in variable names in Python, and
I've also used Greek characters and others.

But in Python I CAN use them. I DON'T HAVE to.

That's a big difference.

Characters like [] or {} are a part of Python's syntax. You can't avoid
using them. If you can't type them, you can't write Python. If it is
awkward to enter them (like having to type Alt-91 or pasting them from a
character table) it is painful to write programs.

German keyboards aquired an AltGr key and the ability to type these
characters in the mid to late 1980's. Presumably because those
characters were common in C and other programming languages and
programmers were complaining. I assume the same happened with keyboards
for other languages. These days you can assume that everybody can type
all ASCII characters (and knows how to do it).

But if you add arbitrary unicode characters to the syntax of your
language, for example using «» to delimit code blocks and ⦃ ⦄ for sets
and ∅ for None, then every programmer will have to figure out how to
enter those characters. And 90 % will probably say "Fuggedaboutit, I'm
not going to learn a new programming language I can't even type!"

hp

--
_ | Peter J. Holzer | Story must make more sense than reality.
|_|_) | |
| | | hjp@hjp.at | -- Charles Stross, "Creative writing
__/ | http://www.hjp.at/ | challenge!"

On 04/03/2022 18.11, Peter J. Holzer wrote:
> On 2022-03-04 23:47:09 +0000, Avi Gross via Python-list wrote:
>> I am not sure a reply is needed, Peter, and what you say is true. But
>> as you point out, when using a German keyboard, I would already have
>> a way to enter symbols like ä, ö, ü and ß and no reason not to include
>> them in variable names and so on if UNICODE is being used properly. I
>> can use my last name in German notation as a variable in Python now:
>>
>> Groß = 144
>> Groß / 12
>> 12.0
>
> Yes, I'm using umlauts occasionally in variable names in Python, and
> I've also used Greek characters and others.
>
> But in Python I CAN use them. I DON'T HAVE to.
>
> That's a big difference.
>
> Characters like [] or {} are a part of Python's syntax. You can't avoid
> using them. If you can't type them, you can't write Python. If it is
> awkward to enter them (like having to type Alt-91 or pasting them from a
> character table) it is painful to write programs.
>
> German keyboards aquired an AltGr key and the ability to type these
> characters in the mid to late 1980's. Presumably because those
> characters were common in C and other programming languages

.... especially Pascal, which was probably bigger in Germany and Austria
in the 1980s than was C.

--
Michael F. Stemper
Psalm 94:3-6

I am not sure how we end up conversing about PASCAL on a Python forum. But it is worth considering how people educated in aspects of Computer Science often come from somewhat different background and how it flavors what they do now.

I paid no attention to where PASCAL was being used other than I did much of my grad school work in PASCAL in the early 80's including my thesis being a document that could be typeset or run from the same file ;-)

And my first job in the field also was doing programming in PASCAL. At the time it seemed to be a new and upcoming language with lots of nifty features. It seemed to have so many ways it was an improvement on languages I had been using including BASIC and Fortran and versions of LISP. So it was a tad surprising when my next job at Bell Labs focused on C (and later C++) as well as a large array of utilities and small languages in the UNIX world. PASCAL was nowhere to be seen nor others that arrived to take over the world like Modula and Ada, and yet didn't. It depends where you are and on your perspective, and perhaps it survived in places like Europe and often has been enhanced. We have mentioned how things like Fortran keep evolving and, in any case, tons of the code we use in aspects of Python and especially some add-in modules, is from libraries of well-honed libraries of functions written in Fortran or C or I am sure in some cases even assembler languages..

I wonder if some languages of the future may supersede languages like Python but retain aspects of them in a similar way? As a hobby, I study lots of languages to see if they add anything or are likely to take over. Some seem to really be focused on a company like Microsoft or Google using it for their own purposes and others who wish to play in their arena may have to go along to operate there. Others seem to be the kind of things academics invent to play with various ideas. So will SCALA or GO or RUST become major players or will they wither away? Will languages that make major changes that make older software not compatible, think Python or PERL as examples, end up stronger or ... motivate some to abandon their projects and switch to a new language/system/paradigm?

I do a lot of data manipulation in an assortment of languages including multiple methods within a language. I can sometimes see how a person asking for features or writing programs has been influenced by earlier experiences. Database people who started with a relational database and mainly used some dialect of SQL, may face some problems in their own way and think making lots of smaller tables in third normal form and constantly doing all kinds of table merges is the natural way to do things. Those who start doing things using Python or R may view things quite differently and often see ways to do things gradually and in a pipelined method and not do what is seen as expensive operations like some kinds of merge. I am not saying everyone does things in a stereotypical way, just that people learn tools and methods and it may show.

Given how much faster some things have become, even hybrid programmers may play games. Yes, you can issue SQL to load data from a database into your Python or R programs but some issue a very basic command and then massage it locally while others do most of the processing in the SQL component so that less is dragged in. Some habits persist even after circumstances change.

I have little against PASCAL and have not looked at how it has evolved but found it a very limiting language after a while. But I find most languages somewhat limited and now think they should be. What makes a language great for me is if it does not try to be too complete but provides a way to extend it so people can come up with their own ways to do more complex things, including various ways to do graphics or statistical analyses and so on, as sort of add-ons which become little languages or worlds grafted on when needed and ignored when not.

Python qualifies albeit it is already too bloated! LOL!

Avi

Palm: 3rd digit from the right, vertically.

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael F. Stemper <michael.stemper@gmail.com>
To: python-list@python.org
Sent: Sat, Mar 5, 2022 1:39 pm
Subject: Re: Behavior of the for-else construct

On 04/03/2022 18.11, Peter J. Holzer wrote:

> On 2022-03-04 23:47:09 +0000, Avi Gross via Python-list wrote:

>> I am not sure a reply is needed, Peter, and what you say is true. But

>> as you point out, when using a German keyboard, I would  already have

>> a way to enter symbols like ä, ö, ü and ß and no reason not to include

>> them in variable names and so on if UNICODE is being used properly. I

>> can use my last name in German notation as a variable in Python now:

>>

>> Groß = 144

>> Groß / 12

>> 12.0

>

> Yes, I'm using umlauts occasionally in variable names in Python, and

> I've also used Greek characters and others.

>

> But in Python I CAN use them. I DON'T HAVE to.

>

> That's a big difference.

>

> Characters like [] or {} are a part of Python's syntax. You can't avoid

> using them. If you can't type them, you can't write Python. If it is

> awkward to enter them (like having to type Alt-91 or pasting them from a

> character table) it is painful to write programs.

>

> German keyboards aquired an AltGr key and the ability to type these

> characters in the mid to late 1980's. Presumably because those

> characters were common in C and other programming languages

.... especially Pascal, which was probably bigger in Germany and Austria

in the 1980s than was C.

--

Michael F. Stemper

Psalm 94:3-6

--

https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list

I am not clear on what you are commenting, Dennis. You are responding to what I do not believe I wrote. You did not quote the part of my message where I wrote what "I" did in the early 80's and did not say when PASCAL was available elsewhere.

"I paid no attention to where PASCAL was being used other than I did much of my grad school work in PASCAL in the early 80's including my thesis being a document that could be typeset or run from the same file ;-)"

I might have encountered it in the early 70's had I had any room in my college course schedule where I ended up with a triple major in other subjects or while I was in Medical school. But no, I only went back to study C.S. afterwards. So, I apologize for being late. Heck I was also not there when ALGOL was created or FORTRAN, let alone COBOL! But if it helps, I taught FORTRAN and other languages to undergrads ;-)

-----Original Message-----
From: Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com>
To: python-list@python.org
Sent: Sat, Mar 5, 2022 7:00 pm
Subject: Re: Behavior of the for-else construct

On Sat, 5 Mar 2022 21:40:08 +0000 (UTC), Avi Gross <avigross@verizon.net>

declaimed the following:

>I am not sure how we end up conversing about PASCAL on a Python forum. But it is worth considering how people educated in aspects of Computer Science often come from somewhat different background and how it flavors what they do now.

>

    You'd prefer REBOL, perhaps?

    REXX at least has some structure to it <G>

    NB: Pascal has, like Ada, always been a <cap><lowercase> name -- not

like the origins of COBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC, et al.

>I paid no attention to where PASCAL was being used other than I did much of my grad school work in PASCAL in the early 80's including my thesis being a document that could be typeset or run from the same file ;-)

>

    Very early? The common versions were probably UCSD (running on UCSD

P-System); or a port of the P-4 compiler (which had been published in book

form) -- maybe a "tinyPascal" (integer only I suspect). Radio Shack did

provide Alcor Pascal for the TRS-80.

    Later, you might have encountered TurboPascal -- which bore little

resemblance to a Jensen&Wirth Pascal.

    J&W was one-program<>one-file (no link libraries, no "include" files as

I recall); very limited math functions if one is trying for scientific

applications (sin, cos, arctan were the trig functions I recall), and that

very unfriendly I/O system (console I/O required special handling from file

I/O as Pascal does a one-element pre-read when an I/O channel is opened --

which occurs on program load for stdin, much before a program could output

a prompt to the user).

    Even my first exposure to VAX/VMS Pascal, which did allow for separate

compilation and linking, required me to declare interfaces to the FORTRAN

run-time library to get advanced math functions (I believe later versions

incorporated the FORTRAN math natively).

--

    Wulfraed                Dennis Lee Bieber        AF6VN

    wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    http://wlfraed.microdiversity.freeddns.org/

--

https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list

On 2022-03-05 14:25:35 -0500, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
> On Sat, 5 Mar 2022 12:39:36 -0600, "Michael F. Stemper"
> <michael.stemper@gmail.com> declaimed the following:
> >... especially Pascal, which was probably bigger in Germany and Austria
> >in the 1980s than was C.
>
> Pascal also defined alternate representations (per Jensen&Wirth) for
> some of those (and I don't recall ever seeing a system that actually had an
> up-arrow character -- and selecting one in character map doesn't help, my
> client doesn't render it).
>
> direct alternate
> ? ^ or @ <no idea what is going to be shown>
> [ (.
> ] .)
> { (*
> } *)

(* *) for comments was actually pretty commonly used - maybe because it
stands out more than { }. I don't know if I've ever seen (. .) instead
of [ ].

C also has alternative rerpresentations for characters not in the common
subset of ISO-646 and EBCDIC. However, the trigraphs are extremely ugly
(e.g ??< ??> instead of { }). I have seen them used (on an IBM/390
system with an EBCDIC variant without curly braces) and it's really no
fun to read that.

hp

--
_ | Peter J. Holzer | Story must make more sense than reality.
|_|_) | |
| | | hjp@hjp.at | -- Charles Stross, "Creative writing
__/ | http://www.hjp.at/ | challenge!"

On 2022-03-05, Avi Gross via Python-list <python-list@python.org> wrote:

> I am not sure how we end up conversing about PASCAL on a Python
> forum.
> [...]
> I paid no attention to where PASCAL was being used other than I did
> much of my grad school work in PASCAL [...]

It's "Pascal". It's not an acronym. It's a guy's name:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal

--
Grant

On 2022-03-06 09:29:19 -0800, Grant Edwards wrote:
> On 2022-03-05, Avi Gross via Python-list <python-list@python.org> wrote:
> > I am not sure how we end up conversing about PASCAL on a Python
> > forum.
> > [...]
> > I paid no attention to where PASCAL was being used other than I did
> > much of my grad school work in PASCAL [...]
>
> It's "Pascal". It's not an acronym. It's a guy's name:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal

And similarly, it's "Perl", not "PERL" (also misspelled in this thread).

hp

--
_ | Peter J. Holzer | Story must make more sense than reality.
|_|_) | |
| | | hjp@hjp.at | -- Charles Stross, "Creative writing
__/ | http://www.hjp.at/ | challenge!"

>>>
Pascal versus PASCAL versus pascal (not versus paschal) and
Perl versus PERL versus perl (not versus pearl)

seems to be a topic.
<<<

The nitpickers here are irrelevant. I happen to know how things are formally spelled and if I was publishing a book, might carefully proofread it.

I sometimes use upper case for Emphasis and do not give a dAMN. But feel free to correct my spelling in case you suspect someone here truly misunderstood a message because it was written with the wrong case.

I do learn, but when it is something I already know and am not particularly interested in proofreading, the result tends to be that I simply get annoyed and the one pointing it out is taken as wandering off topic even more than I do.

Python is named after a snake right? So is it upper case or lower case or mixed case? No, wait, it is named after Monty Python. But what made them choose that name and why would anyone then name a programming language after them? I can see some rudimentary reasoning in naming Ada and maybe for Pascal, albeit I can think of many others who deserve it as much or more that nobody has chosen to honor. Did Turing catch on, I mean as a programming language rather than a machine?

I don't care if someone says PYTHON or Python or python when informally discussing things. They all mean the same thing to me. On the other hand, names like "R" and "S" and "C" are rarely presented as lower-case while I sometimes see c++ or c# for some reason. Obviously the right version is upper case, albeit the plus sign and sharp sign have no upper case version.

FORTRAN supposedly stands for FORmula TRANslator or something. So why does it have to be all uppercase? Was COBOL named for COmmon Business Oriented Language. Should it be CoBOL?

I have lots of awareness that Perl is generally written in mixed case, except when it isn't. I have seen people justify the name by saying it was short for Practical Extraction and Report Language but also for Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister! If I felt it was important, I would write it whatever way is formally required.

What I think often happens, from a human psychology perspective, is we see Perl in middle of a sentence as a spelling mistake while PERL is obviously something like an acronym. Pascal may be named for a French person I admire but may still look like a nonsense word to those who do not know or care. Not a great excuse, of course.

But if this was being graded in these ways, and I see lots of such nitpicking in other ways when an example focusing on something does not carefully do lots of other things, I probably would focus on the many other things I don't get around to doing in my life because I waste the time here. As a voluntary effort, I can opt out.

The argument that a programming language is named after a person and thus must be spelled some way is not impressing me. Yes, to be strictly correct, it has a proper spelling. But following that reasoning, why does anyone give an email address of john.smith@gmail.com or JANEDOE@yahoo.com instead of ....?

-----Original Message-----
From: Peter J. Holzer <hjp-python@hjp.at>
To: python-list@python.org
Sent: Sun, Mar 6, 2022 12:48 pm
Subject: Re: Behavior of the for-else construct

On 2022-03-06 09:29:19 -0800, Grant Edwards wrote:

> On 2022-03-05, Avi Gross via Python-list <python-list@python.org> wrote:
> > I am not sure how we end up conversing about PASCAL on a Python
> > forum.
> > [...]
> > I paid no attention to where PASCAL was being used other than I did
> > much of my grad school work in PASCAL [...]
>
> It's "Pascal". It's not an acronym. It's a guy's name:
>
>    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal

And similarly, it's "Perl", not "PERL" (also misspelled in this thread).

        hp

--
  _  | Peter J. Holzer    | Story must make more sense than reality.
|_|_) |                    |
| |  | hjp@hjp.at        |    -- Charles Stross, "Creative writing
__/  | http://www.hjp.at/ |      challenge!"

--
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list

On Mon, 7 Mar 2022 at 09:51, Avi Gross via Python-list
<python-list@python.org> wrote:
>
> >>>
> Pascal versus PASCAL versus pascal (not versus paschal) and
> Perl versus PERL versus perl (not versus pearl)
>
> seems to be a topic.
> <<<
>
> The nitpickers here are irrelevant. I happen to know how things are formally spelled and if I was publishing a book, might carefully proofread it.

So what you're saying is that you don't really care unless it's in a
book. Good to know. I make errors now and then, but I consider them to
be errors, and I would like to reduce their number.

> Python is named after a snake right? So is it upper case or lower case or mixed case? No, wait, it is named after Monty Python. But what made them choose that name and why would anyone then name a programming language after them? I can see some rudimentary reasoning in naming Ada and maybe for Pascal, albeit I can think of many others who deserve it as much or more that nobody has chosen to honor. Did Turing catch on, I mean as a programming language rather than a machine?
>

If you want strange naming conventions, apparently there's "Apache Pig
Latin", "Ballerina", "Hopscotch", "Mercury", and even this bizarre
thing called "ECMAScript", can't possibly imagine why anyone would use
a thing like that, right?

Things get named, usually by their creators. Deliberately misnaming
something is insulting it.

> I don't care if someone says PYTHON or Python or python when informally discussing things. They all mean the same thing to me. On the other hand, names like "R" and "S" and "C" are rarely presented as lower-case while I sometimes see c++ or c# for some reason. Obviously the right version is upper case, albeit the plus sign and sharp sign have no upper case version.
>
> FORTRAN supposedly stands for FORmula TRANslator or something. So why does it have to be all uppercase? Was COBOL named for COmmon Business Oriented Language. Should it be CoBOL?
>

Because that's what their creators decided. Or are you in a more
authoritative position?

I think you should have been named AVI144, not Avi Gross. We shouldn't
bother to try to call you by your name, it's much more reasonable to
call you something else.

> But if this was being graded in these ways, and I see lots of such nitpicking in other ways when an example focusing on something does not carefully do lots of other things, I probably would focus on the many other things I don't get around to doing in my life because I waste the time here. As a voluntary effort, I can opt out.
>
> The argument that a programming language is named after a person and thus must be spelled some way is not impressing me. Yes, to be strictly correct, it has a proper spelling. But following that reasoning, why does anyone give an email address of john.smith@gmail.com or JANEDOE@yahoo.com instead of ...?
>

Email addresses consist of a mailbox part, interpreted entirely by the
server, and a domain, which is defined as case insensitive and
conventionally written in lowercase. There's no difference between
john.smith@gmail.com and john.smith@GMAIL.COM, but it's up to Google's
servers to decide whether john.smith is the same as JOHN.SMITH (and,
in the case of Google, they've decided that it's the same as johnsmith
and johns.mith too).

ChrisA

On 2022-03-06, Avi Gross via Python-list <python-list@python.org> wrote:

> Python is named after a snake right?

No. It's named after a comedy troupe.

--
Grant

On 2022-03-06 18:34:39 -0800, Grant Edwards wrote:
> On 2022-03-06, Avi Gross via Python-list <python-list@python.org> wrote:
> > Python is named after a snake right?
>
> No. It's named after a comedy troupe.

He actually wrote that two sentences later.

hp

--
_ | Peter J. Holzer | Story must make more sense than reality.
|_|_) | |
| | | hjp@hjp.at | -- Charles Stross, "Creative writing
__/ | http://www.hjp.at/ | challenge!"

On 2022-03-07, Peter J. Holzer <hjp-python@hjp.at> wrote:
> On 2022-03-06 18:34:39 -0800, Grant Edwards wrote:
>> On 2022-03-06, Avi Gross via Python-list <python-list@python.org> wrote:
>> > Python is named after a snake right?
>>
>> No. It's named after a comedy troupe.
>
> He actually wrote that two sentences later.

Yes, I missed that. His messages wrap very strangely in my newsreader.

--
Grant

Can someone please change the topic of this thread? No longer about for-else.

Teledyne Confidential; Commercially Sensitive Business Data

-----Original Message-----
From: Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com>
Sent: Sunday, March 6, 2022 1:29 PM
To: python-list@python.org
Subject: Re: Behavior of the for-else construct

On Sun, 6 Mar 2022 17:39:51 +0100, "Peter J. Holzer" <hjp-python@hjp.at> declaimed the following:

>
>(* *) for comments was actually pretty commonly used - maybe because it
>stands out more than { }. I don't know if I've ever seen (. .) instead
>of [ ].
>
Or some terminals provided [ ] but not { } <G>

Modula-2 appears to have fixed on (* *) for comments, and only [ ] for indexing.

Consider the potential mayhem going from a language where { } are comment delimiters to one where they are block delimiters <G>

>C also has alternative rerpresentations for characters not in the
>common subset of ISO-646 and EBCDIC. However, the trigraphs are
>extremely ugly (e.g ??< ??> instead of { }). I have seen them used (on
>an IBM/390 system with an EBCDIC variant without curly braces) and it's
>really no fun to read that.
>
My college mainframe used EBCDIC, but the available languages did not include C or Pascal. We had APL, FORTRAN-IV (in full separate compilation form, and FLAG [FORTRAN Load and Go] which was a "all in one file, compile & run" used by first year students), COBOL (74?), BASIC, SNOBOL, Meta-Symbol and AP (both assemblers, though Meta-Symbol could, provided the proper definition file, generate absolute binary code for pretty much any processor), and something called SL-1 (Simulation Language-1, which produced FORTRAN output for discrete event models).

UCSD Pascal, and PDP-11 assembly were run on a pair of LSI-11 systems.
Assembly used for the operating system principles course.

I didn't encounter "real" C until getting a TRS-80 (first as integer LC, then Pro-MC), along with Supersoft LISP (on cassette tape!). (I had books for C and Ada before encountering compilers for them)

--
Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber AF6VN
wlfraed@ix.netcom.com http://wlfraed.microdiversity.freeddns.org/

On 2022-03-07 06:00:57 -0800, Grant Edwards wrote:
> On 2022-03-07, Peter J. Holzer <hjp-python@hjp.at> wrote:
> > On 2022-03-06 18:34:39 -0800, Grant Edwards wrote:
> >> On 2022-03-06, Avi Gross via Python-list <python-list@python.org> wrote:
> >> > Python is named after a snake right?
> >>
> >> No. It's named after a comedy troupe.
> >
> > He actually wrote that two sentences later.
>
> Yes, I missed that. His messages wrap very strangely in my newsreader.

Yes, he writes every paragraph as a single long line which makes it hard
to read.

hp

--
_ | Peter J. Holzer | Story must make more sense than reality.
|_|_) | |
| | | hjp@hjp.at | -- Charles Stross, "Creative writing
__/ | http://www.hjp.at/ | challenge!"