[Python-Dev] Python 1.7 tokenization feature request (original) (raw)

David M. Beazley beazley@rustler.cs.uchicago.edu
Mon, 13 Mar 2000 17:12:55 -0600 (CST)

gvwilson@nevex.com writes:

'S funny --- my non-programmer friends can't figure out why any sane person would use a glorified glass TTY like emacs... or why they should have to, just to program...

Look, I'm all for CP4E and making programming more accessible to the masses, but as a professional programmer, I frankly do not care what non-programmers think about the tools that I (and most of the programming world) use to write software. Furthermore, if all of your non-programmer friends don't want to care about the underlying details, they certainly won't care how programs are represented---including a nice and simple text representation without markup, entities, and other syntax that is not an essential part of the language. However, as a professional, I most certainly DO care about how programs are represented--specifically, I want to be able to move them around between machines. Edit them with essentially any editor, transform them as I see fit, and be able to easily read them and have a sense of what is going on. Markup is just going to make this a huge pain in the butt. No, I'm not for this idea one bit. Sorry.

I just think that someone's going to do this for some language, some time soon, and I'd rather Python be in the lead than play catch-up.

What gives you the idea that Python is behind? What is it playing catch up to?

-- Dave