Old version, and after a bit of hacking, here’s the latest version.

Patch is available, apply to latest Python svn trunk.

Common Lisp newbie tip of the day: I found this one while trying to find out how to make a function redirect output from a stream to a string that I could put in a variable. Sending nil to format will make it return a string, but any function using format will have to collect the results from the calls to format.

The solution is quite simple. The macro with-output-to-string will create a character output stream quite easily:

CL-USER> (with-output-to-string (stream)
(print stream)
(difflib:unified-diff stream "foobar" "foozot"))

#<SB-IMPL::STRING-OUTPUT-STREAM {1538C419}> 
"---
+++
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
f
o
o
-b
-a
-r
+z
+o
+t" 

Difflib here is from CL-DIFFLIB. Quite handy!

I don’t know Ruby very well, and I have only looked at Ruby briefly a couple of times, and this of course is not sufficient to make an objective and qualified judgment of Ruby. However, what would the Internet be without unqualified ramblings?

(03:42:11 PM) Jesper: 6400**6400
(03:42:33 PM) Jesper: my calculator won't even tell me what that is
(03:42:39 PM) V: try lisp!
(03:42:46 PM) Jesper: you try lisp
(03:55:53 PM) V: ok
(03:55:55 PM) V: * (expt 6400 6400)

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(03:56:17 PM) Jesper: cool
(03:56:27 PM) V: yes

For Java there is Javadoc, for Perl there is perldoc, and for Python there is pydoc.

I haven’t played around with pydoc too much, I usually use online documentation or read documentation in source code files. Last week I wrote some code that used PyCha to plot a few datasets, and not only did that experience make me realize that PyCha has a severe lack of documentation, but also that pydoc generates HTML that looks like something from the last century.

Pointless benchmarks of code generating Fibonacci numbers is a recurring theme on PRC, and in addition it’s also a place with frequent posts about esoteric programming languages.