Re: Re: Python/Parrot still alive? (fwd)

On Feb 9, 2004, at 10:10 AM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
>
> In addition, "interpreter" has commonly two meanings: (1) the virtual
> machine; (2) the read-eval-print loop.
>
> I think that meaning 2 is probably not technically correct, but I've
> met so many people who used it in this way (often at the excusion of
> meaning 1) that this by itself is another reason to start using
> virtual machine.  OTOH we may usefully use meaning 2 to distinguish
> ourselves from Java (and even Perl).
>

That's a good point.  The marketing message would be that  "Java and 
Perl only have virtual machines, Python has BOTH a virtual machine and 
an interpreter".  Of course, that comes perilously close to "there's 
more than one way to do it" :-)

The ability to fire up an interactive session and type some code at it 
is one of the real strong points of Python.  It's often faster to type 
"dir (foo)" than it is to look up the documentation for foo to see what 
methods it has.  Ditto with trying out a code snippet.