Re: PYTHON VS. PERL VS. TCL

Aaron Watters (aaron@funcity.njit.edu)
Wed, 19 Apr 1995 14:17:51 GMT

After saying some nice and sensible things...

In article <9504131455.AA10039@seelebrennt.lehman.com> jredford@lehman.com writes:
>
>...On the other hand, if you want to write a piece of reliable code,
>Python is your worst enemy. Python's practice of throwing around
>namespaces in the interpreted langauge makes it _inheriently_
>untrustworthy. Tcl restricts this type of game to the extension API,
>and Perl dosent do it noticably at all....

This could not be more of a mistatement. If you have any sense
python's namespace scheme is a great advantage in writing reliable
code. If you are a moron, you can write
moduleA.classB.methodC = moduleD.instanceE.methodF
and all hell may break loose, but, again, only a moron would do
this for anything other than very special purposes.

That said, I would like to see the ability to "freeze" a namespace
so a module implementer can make abuses like this absolutely
impossible (I did an experiment along these lines). Please, when
you complain publicly about things like this, include an example
so everyone can see just how obscure your complaint is. -a.

====
Let's see if I can get Larry's attention here:
Perl
Hi, Larry!