The Migration Begins

My goal was to use my old computer for as long as possible, and then when it failed I'd redeem my Christmas laptop voucher. The Beloved had a quiet word with me and explained that his criterion for switching to a new computer would be when the old computer was regularly causing hassle. With that in mind, here's my new computer, an HP Stream 11. 

It's almost the same as my old one. The major differences are: it doesn't fall into a coma when it's meant to be going to sleep; there's double the RAM and storage; the keyboard layout is ever so slightly different (I'll be hitting # when I mean to press 'return'); the touch pad has a different texture. Oh, and it's grey and black rather than blue and white. The new machine is just as light as the old one, and I'm expecting the battery to be just as long lasting.

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!