Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

Python possesses a number of features that differentiate itself from Perl. First, Python was
designed as an object-oriented scripting language (Perl gained reasonable object-oriented capabilities
in version 5; however, on a whole Perl is still used very much as a functional
programming language). Second, unlike Perl, the style of writing scripts is very strict. Proper
indentation of code, whitespace, and line breaks have specific, essential meaning to Python. This
often makes existing Python code much easier to understand than most Perl code, but dictating
a strict style has also caused a few issues through Pythons evolution (and of course has caused a
few “free thinking” individuals to shun the language).
Python has been around on the Mac for a while (beginning with MacPython even before
OS X). Today, like Perl, it’s a standard part of Darwin. Unlike Perl, Python is developed as a
framework, rather than a traditional Darwin application. This makes Python available for
Cocoa programming as well as Darwin development right out of the box.
Learning Python is fairly easy with lots of books and online tutorials available. One of the
best places to start is the Python tutorial at http://docs.python.org/tut/. One nice part about
learning Python is that it comes with its own interactive interpreter, which will start when you
type python at the command line without arguments. Not only is this a great tool for learning the
language, but it can be very handy for unleashing the power of Python for common tasks. We use
the Python interpreter all the time as a calculator (we find it much faster and more flexible to
use than the GUI calculator for most things). A session with the Python interpreter could look
like this:
Leopard:~ scott$ Python
Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Jun 4 2007, 18:21:31)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5450)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> x=2
>>> for y in range(11):
... y*x
...
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
18
20
>>>
As you may devise from this, you can accomplish a lot of stuff with very little code. Once a
programmer learns the nuances of Python, they generally find themselves creating code at a significantly
faster pace than with most other languages.
Ruby
CHAPTER 19 EXTENDING THE POWER OF DARWIN 341
Ruby is the new kid in the family, but it’s making quite a showing, largely because of the buzz
surrounding Ruby on Rails (RoR), a very nice web application framework written in Ruby.
Ruby shares many similarities with Python in general and on Leopard. Both are object oriented
(in Ruby everything becomes an object), both are relatively easy to pick up, and both include an
interactive interpreter for playing around with code (Ruby’s interactive interpreter is not built
into the language in the same way that Python’s is; to get to the Ruby interactive interpreter, you