From: Mark Lawrence on
On 17/07/2010 03:59, python(a)bdurham.com wrote:
> Tim,
>
>> 2.x?! You were lucky. We lived for three months with Python 1.x in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, write our 1.x code using ed, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down in machine language, fourteen hours a day,
> week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad
> would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt...
>
> Luxury. Our computers only had 256 bytes[1] of RAM and We had to enter
> our code, in the dark, using loose binary toggle switches with poor
> connections. We used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in
> the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at
> the mill every day for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat
> us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were LUCKY!
>
> Cheers,
> Malcolm
>
> [1] http://incolor.inebraska.com/bill_r/elf/html/elf-1-33.htm

I'm just envisaging a "Paper Tape Repairman" sketch.

Kindest regards.

Mark Lawrence.

From: Thomas Jollans on
On 07/17/2010 10:03 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Fri, 16 Jul 2010 21:23:09 -0500, Tim Chase wrote:
>
>>> Is anyone /still/ using Python 2.x? ;-)
>>
>> 2.x?! You were lucky. We lived for three months with Python 1.x in a
>> septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, write our
>> 1.x code using ed,
>
> You got to use ed? Oh, we *dreamed* of using an editor! We had to edit
> the sectors on disk directly with a magnetised needle. A rusty, blunt
> needle.
>

You try and tell the young people of today that, and they won't believe
you.
From: Paul McGuire on
On Jul 16, 12:01 pm, Peng Yu <pengyu...(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> I mean to get the man page for '[' like in the following code.
>
> x=[1,2,3]
>
> But help('[') doesn't seem to give the above usage.
>
> ###########
> Mutable Sequence Types
> **********************
>
> List objects support additional operations that allow in-place
> modification of the object. Other mutable sequence types (when added
> to the language) should also support these operations. Strings and
> tuples are immutable sequence types: such objects cannot be modified
> once created. The following operations are defined on mutable sequence
> types (where *x* is an arbitrary object):
> ...
> ##########
>
> I then checked help('LISTLITERALS'), which gives some description that
> is available from the language reference. So '[' in "x=[1,2,3]" is
> considered as a language feature rather than a function or an
> operator?
>
> ############
> List displays
> *************
>
> A list display is a possibly empty series of expressions enclosed in
> square brackets:
>
>    list_display        ::= "[" [expression_list | list_comprehension] "]"
>    list_comprehension  ::= expression list_for
>    list_for            ::= "for" target_list "in" old_expression_list
> [list_iter]
>    old_expression_list ::= old_expression [("," old_expression)+ [","]]
>    list_iter           ::= list_for | list_if
>    list_if             ::= "if" old_expression [list_iter]
> .....
> ###########
> --
> Regards,
> Peng

Also look for __getitem__ and __setitem__, these methods defined on
your own container classes will allow you to write "myobject['x']" and
have your own custom lookup code get run.

-- Paul
From: Gary Herron on
On 07/17/2010 01:03 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Fri, 16 Jul 2010 21:23:09 -0500, Tim Chase wrote:
>
>
>>> Is anyone /still/ using Python 2.x? ;-)
>>>
>> 2.x?! You were lucky. We lived for three months with Python 1.x in a
>> septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, write our
>> 1.x code using ed,
>>
> You got to use ed? Oh, we *dreamed* of using an editor! We had to edit
> the sectors on disk directly with a magnetised needle. A rusty, blunt
> needle.
>

Along those lines, there's this -- one of my favorite comics:

http://xkcd.com/378/

and unrelated to the thread but still about python:

http://xkcd.com/353/

Gary Herron


From: Thomas Jollans on
On 07/17/2010 06:38 PM, Gary Herron wrote:
> On 07/17/2010 01:03 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>> On Fri, 16 Jul 2010 21:23:09 -0500, Tim Chase wrote:
>>
>>
>>>> Is anyone /still/ using Python 2.x? ;-)

> http://xkcd.com/353/

There we have the most important difference between Python 2 and 3: in
the latter, "import antigravity" actually works.