Software Engineering Radio

Actually, there are few TCL scripts on Linux systems unless you go looking for them, but some of the most popular Linux distributions include quite a number of python scripts out of the box – notably Ubuntu and Redhat. Novell does not ship with that much of either TCL or Python though.

With regard to Python’s “significant whitespace” – you probably owe it to yourself to look at it more seriously. Granted, in early FORTRAN’s, significant whitespace (and the -lack- thereof as well) was a big headache, but that was because it -introduced- problems. In python, the significant whitespace -eliminates- an important class of problems found in most mainstream languages – that of indentation not necessarily reflecting actual code structure, and hence misleading the programmer.

People don’t freak out about the significant whitespace in Bourne Shell or Haskell or OCaml – why is it ostensibly a big problem (only) in python?

If you’re automatically generating python code:
1) It’s a very easy algorithm to indent the stuff
2) You probably should indent for a curly brace language anyway, even if the code is auto-generated

Ruby sounds like a fine language, but I don’t think Python should be discounted based on such a trivial canard.