Hello Phil, Tuesday, March 30, 2004, 3:09:25 AM, you wrote: PT> In article <112914078.20040330014722 / scriptolutions.com>, PT> Lothar Scholz <mailinglists / scriptolutions.com> wrote: >>Hello Serve, >> >>Monday, March 29, 2004, 10:04:25 PM, you wrote: >> >> >>SL> "Lothar Scholz" <mailinglists / scriptolutions.com> wrote in message >>SL> news:41663875.20040328202116 / scriptolutions.com... >>>> Hello Serve, >>>> >>>> Sunday, March 28, 2004, 3:44:25 PM, you wrote: >>>> >>>> SL> I'm trying to decide to learn either python or ruby. Are there >>SL> fundamental >>>> SL> differences between them? >>>> >>>> No, there aren't any fundamental difference. From an educational point >>>> they the same, also not different from perl or tcl. >>>> Imperative script languages with OO extensions. >> >>SL> Wasn't python designed with ease of use as top priority? Surely there must >> >>No i don't think that python has such a top priority. It came from a >>mathematical branch of a dutch university. Perl had a top priority in >>extracting data from text files, and TCL had the top goal of making it >>easy to embedd in C applications. Ruby is as useable for extracting >>data as Perl now, but nobody else reached the TCL/TK level of ease of >>embedding, you can do this in 2 lines in TCL but need a few duzend in >>Ruby - thats the reason why TCL is still so popular (a magnitude more >>popular then Ruby) and TCL is in my experience still the most advanced >>scripting language (with the technically best GUI Toolkit) - even >>better then Perl. PT> TCL the most advanced scripting language No other language has complete separate multiple interpreters in the core, almost perfect Unicode handling and a way of doing multithreading that give you the advantage of modern CPU's (multicore CPU's which is definetely the future). Yes it's slower and it is procedural and not good for advanced datastructures. But this doesn't matter because it always makes clear that it is a scripting language. Python and Ruby say that they are a general purpose language. They can be used like this, but i doubt that they are good general purpose language, because they are very very slow (around 100 to 300 times) for a lot of tasks. PT> and TK 'technically the best GUI PT> Toolkit'?! Well I guess YMMV(AL) (Your Milage May Vary (A Lot)) ;-) Yes it still is. It is not looking well and it doesn't support some widgets that are now standart. But TK is the only toolkit that has a really working and customizeable event loop. QT,GTK,FOX,FLTK they all miss this feature. It has the best layout managers (try to find something like the grid layout manager), the same level of unicode awareness then QT and the best event handling (callback system) that was ever implemented in a toolkit. Simply try to bind the Hotkey "Control-E Control-E Mouse-Button-Down" to a procedure in another toolkit :-) But i must say that i did not do any programming in the last 3 years with TCL. Instead i moved to PHP, Python and Ruby (and Java,Eiffel,C,C++). All of them have much better language concepts but none of them has reached the implementation quality that TCL reached 3 years ago. -- Best regards, Lothar mailto:mailinglists / scriptolutions.com