01 August, 2017

Python


My first steps, or perhaps slithers, have been taken back into coding. Apart from dabbling in a little HTML, I have written no code in years. I saw MIT had a free first year university course in computing and decided to look into it. The language used is Python, and so, I'm starting to learn Python.

One of the interesting things I have found is it only recognises 'True' and 'False' as Boolean values. The capitalisation is most important. This means I can write:

FALSE = True
TRUE = False

The syntax is correct. The static semantics is correct, as it the semantics. The only problem with it is that it's a daft thing for a programmer to do. It's the sort of thing that can land people in programming doo-doo.

I'm also not enamoured by white space being part of the syntax. It whiffs to much of FORTRAN77 which is not a free-format language. However, FORTRAN77 is not case-sensitive, so X is the same variable as x. Must test this out fully in Python!

----

Testing has been completed. X and x are not the same thing. Also, 'True' is not a reserved word. 

    True = False
    variable = True
    print (variable)
    print (True)

This results in:

    False
    False

This is a very strange language, and you really need to keep your eye on it!

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