I'm not familiar with GW Basic, but Python is certainly a lot different from C...its dynamic and strongly typed vs. C's static and weak typing, it supports OO out of the box, and it's interpreted, not compiled. List comprehensions, generator expressions, closures are awesome. Tons of great libraries. For low performance tasks it's a great language for getting a lot of work done with a minimum of code.
Hi all,
Whilst at some stranger's house on completely unrelated business I noticed a book in a waste basket in his study. On plucking it out I found it was called, 'Low Level Measurements for Effective Low Current, Low Voltage and High Impedance Measurements' - quite a long title but descriptive enough to require no further explanation! This fellow was a retired mechanical engineer with no interest in electronics, so I'm not sure why he even had it in the first place. However, I asked him since he was throwing it away could I have it (for free) and I'm now the pround owner of it! A worthy addition to my collection on specialist electronics subjects. Not bad, eh? :-)
It's a Keithley Instruments, Inc applications book.
That's the Keithley book. It has a good discussion on low leakage design, iirc. I'll have to pull it off the shelf for beach reading, now that it's finally up to 50 degrees. ;)
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
Gin and Tonic will keep you warm.
Makes it harder to code Verilog though--nasty mixture of Pascal and Basic. ;)
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
You should have stopped before you started seeing the pink elephants.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
Yup.
Speaking of nasty languages, my guys here are all in a rage for Python, so I looked into it.
Hideous. Mixture of c and GW Basic.
Python is sort of like Arduino in a way--its advantage is that it has a whole lot of libraries.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
Also makes you delusional, but we'll not go there.
Jamie
It doesn't matter what the language is, just that they like it and are good at programming it.
tm
Yup.
I don't know where he pulled "GW Basic" from... that's the old MS-DOS BASIC, as in, classic BASIC with line numbers and GOTOs and all that horrible stuff. Little library support -- just whatever's in it (how many keywords were in the original BASIC standard, anyway..? I don't know), and the syntax doesn't even support indenting. Easily as far removed from BASIC as C is. Worlds apart.
Tim
I love the pascal, even though verilog isn't exactly pascal but close looking in nature, the basic, well, as it says, very basic! :)
Jamie
You may want to do a feel test first, those elephants may actually be real! We have some strange parties locally during the summer, the natives get dressed up in the strangest outfits.
Jamie
50!?? I finally saw my lawn yesterday. And this morning it's covered with ~6" of snow.. again. It's been a loooong winter. The black* birds are pissed too. My wife cleared a spot for them under the bird feeder and it's been standing room only all day.
George H.
*most red wings, but some grackles and starlings too.
I have it myself. I think it is a freebie. The other good one to have is the ADI nonlinear circuits book.
One of the interesting things about Python is that for every hour you spend programming in Python, you are required to spend five hours trying to convince other people to use Python. As someone with more experience than me has commented, "I find that Python is much improved if you ignore its community."
Also, having been paid money to program in FORTRAN 77, I'm glad I don't have to anymore. Caring about what column things are in is OK, IMHO, for a language designed in 1957, but not for one designed in 1991.
On the positive side, Python *does* have a ton of libraries to do many different things, and interface with other packages.
Matt Roberds
If anyone is interested, the 7th Edition is availble for download from Keithley
Cheers
Other than being interpreted, and having print, if, and else, as keywords, how is python like gw-basic?
I downloaded it! Thanks, Martin.
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