I hate to pop your bubble Daniel Joyce, but this is a Squeak list.


> 1) I'd love a read-eval-print-loop that acts like all the other
>> read-eval-print-loops I'm used to. This business of selecting text and
>> hitting alt-P or ctrl-P or whatever is driving both me and Sarah (the
>> student I have working with me) nuts for some reason. I want to type a
>> line, hit return, and have the result print on a new line. I want to be
>> able to hit the up arrow to select previous inputs, and use some sort of
>> completion to refine that, like in MATLAB.
>>
>
>	Python has that...
>
>> 2) A standard multidimensional array class, built into the image, that
>> everyone can depend on and use in a consistent way. Squeak arrays as far
>> as I can tell are 1-D. (Maybe I'm confused on that and someone can help
>> me.)
>
>	Numeric Python has that... Very Very Powerful ones. So much so, the
>Python
>Imaging library uses it.
>
>>
>> If you want Squeak to win the Hearts and Minds of ECEs, or engineers in
>> general, having a built-in suite of linear algebra operations would be a
>> good thing. I'd love to see MATLAB type functionality in Squeak, where I
>> could do something like, say,
>>
>> (((a square) + (b sqrt)) inv) matrixMult: c
>>
>
>	Numeric Python again...
>
>> to square all the elements of a, take the square root of all the elements
>> of b, and then invert that matrix and then multiply it by another matrix
>> c, all in one line. (I'm not really comfortable with mentally parsing a
>> complicated set of message send yet, so my Squeak code tends to have a ton
>> of parens, or else I get horribly confused.)
>
>	Numeric Python, and the linear algebra add-on
>>
>> I've read that you folks are worried about "image bloat" - rightfully so -
>> but I'm concerned that if everyone has their own various different
>> packages for doing linear algebra, that would lead to a Tower of Babel
>> situation.
>
>	Well, Python has several things I like....
>
>	1) Sane library/import systems. Sane namespaces.
>	2) The ability to code extensions in C, and hook them into Python,
>and have
>them appear as other Pythonic Object. When PyPy comes out, with it's dynamic
>recomplier, and written in itself, it will have what Squeak has been
>promising for 5 years. Squeak is written in itself, yes, but the new Jitter
>has gone through 4-5 aborted stalled attempts.
>	3) It has no wonderous GUI. But I can choose to use it, or loose
>it. IDLE is
>very nice, and there is no reason why one couldn't write a ST like
>environment on top of python. With Python's syntax, it'd be very easy to make
>it support both 'self' and 'smalltalk' behaviors. The object model is
>infinitely flexible. Python's sound support WORKS, unlike Squeak on Linux
>which to break in different ways at different times.
>	4) Python supports a wide variety of 3rd party tools and libraries.
>TwistedMatrix alone is a networking library that Squeak, or any language
>would kill to have. Very well written, very, excedingly easy to use.