Path: csiph.com!usenet.pasdenom.info!news.albasani.net!news.mixmin.net!feeds.phibee-telecom.net!usenet.ukfsn.org!not-for-mail From: Martin Gregorie Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer Subject: Re: multi-line Strings Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2012 22:21:15 +0000 (UTC) Organization: UK Free Software Network Lines: 35 Message-ID: References: <7f36342c-2331-4484-874b-4a0f8953f160@googlegroups.com> <50c61150$0$293$14726298@news.sunsite.dk> <50c6413a$0$293$14726298@news.sunsite.dk> <50c6598d$0$290$14726298@news.sunsite.dk> <50c6976d$0$283$14726298@news.sunsite.dk> NNTP-Posting-Host: 84.45.235.129 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: localhost.localdomain 1355264475 6431 84.45.235.129 (11 Dec 2012 22:21:15 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@localhost.localdomain NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2012 22:21:15 +0000 (UTC) User-Agent: Pan/0.139 (Sexual Chocolate; GIT bf56508 git://git.gnome.org/pan2) Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.java.programmer:20259 On Mon, 10 Dec 2012 21:16:14 -0500, Arne Vajhøj wrote: > But I am not among them. I think Python is OK. I would not use it for > the same tasks as Java, but still. > Its more or less OK. In its favour is a good compiler/interpreter: almost as good as awk when it comes to diagnostics and very much better in this respect than Perl or js. There are really three things I don't like about it: - the aforementioned ugly pointerised object syntax - the reversal of the meaning of 'self' compared with Java and, IIRC, C++ - the poor backward compatibility with previous versions of Python. I haven't used it enough to run into backward compatibility problems, but from general programmers chatter about it, it seems that the syntax and support library differences between v2.7 and 3.0 (and between 2.4 and 2.7) appear to be quite a problem. This seems to be about the worst case of discontinuity within a language that I can recall since COBOL upgrades in the early/mid '80s, but at least it was *only* the language because COBOL has no standard library to speak of. There was a huge C discontinuity between K&R C and ANSI C, but at least the modern compilers will still compile K&R programs and the standard library mostly still works with old programs. This is something that Java has managed very well: I haven't used it nearly as long as some of you here, but I've yet to revisit any of my older code and find that it refused to compile and run. -- martin@ | Martin Gregorie gregorie. | Essex, UK org |