Lucky book find!

When I was young I wanted to try programming assembly while drunk, but I was only drunk a few times and never had the opportunity.

I wonder if a "Rain Man" type can learn to program.

Isn't that where windows came from?

That's the main thing I didn't like about it. Hit the reformat button and you destroy the program.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

A bracket by any other name...

Oddly enough, obfuscated BASIC is much clearer than C (and I should suppose, obfuscated Python even clearer still; give or take, like, abuse of edge cases in those massive libraries, or whatever). White space makes no difference in C; in BASIC, you have the colon to help screw things up, but you can only chain so many statements before, say, a one-line IF statement has to end. (To be fair, I suppose any obfuscator worth their salt would simply turn to the WHILE or DO statement, with the added bonus of looking perverse.)

Tim

But Wait! There's more!

Python with Braces

Python with Braces is a variant of the Python programming language, that has one significant difference: it uses standard C style braces for defining scopes rather than the classic python indentation. This makes Python more similar to other programming languages, and can also enable the introduction of new concepts such as anonymous functions and classes to Python.

Don't worry, be happy.

Frank McKenney

well,

:)

Personally I like the indenting, it feels quite natural, just like I e.g. write pseudocode. Most half-decent programmers editors will work fine with it.

You and I and everyone else indent stuff, of course. I just don't like it changing the semantics.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

the worst is make requiring tabs not spaces

-Lasse

I know. Infuriating, even with a decent programmer's editor.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

To add to that..

Jamie

A few other resources for low current (fA/attoA) measurements:

-video on ti.com on how to scrub a chip

-Bob Pease - femtoampere stuff anyhow "electrometer grade chips" techlib.com - ion chamber circuits just in case...

I don't deny your feelings, but isn't it like a bad radio you listen to, then after a while it sounds OK? I realize there are limits to that... I do prefer C, but there is a graphics library, SimpleCV, which runs on linux on the RPi. It's in Python. I suppose it's a tradeoff. You get some higher level commands along with the slowness and imprecision. Never used it...

Thanks for the heads up.

?-)

This makes no sense. Python already /has/ anonymous functions (lambdas) and classes, and has done since its earliest days.

IIRC, last time I looked for these the later editions seemed dumbed down (and shorter).

Lots of people like Python, and if I were just starting out, I might well go with it. (My son the physics student likes it a lot better than Matlab, for instance.)

What I generally do is to write a C++ program that talks to Gnuplot via a pipe. Once you figure that out once, you can just hack up the old program to do the new thing. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I still think it's a good first language for learning to program, since it's powerful but not cryptic.