OT: base64 decoding

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, May 07, 2009, John Esak wrote:
>I've been working in Python too lately.  Just running through the beginning
>book... And it is so powerful.  I think I said this a year or so ago, too.
>But now, I'm actually putting together little python scripts to do things on
>my PDA which is Linux based and uses python for everything.  Someone,
>probably Mark, then piped up how PERL is just as good or better... Don't

I used perl for most of my work for about 15 years, but now work
almost exclusively in python as I find it much easier to work
with both for short scripts and large systems.  In general I
think the python syntax is far cleaner than perl's (I often have
said the only modem noise I speak is perl :-), and that object
oriented programming is *FAR* simpler in python than perl.

IHMO, perl has far too much ``magic'', which makes it more
difficult to figure out what it's doing unless perhaps one is as
smart as Damian Conway, Randal, or Larry.

One thing I do when writing python that would drive a Python
Purist bonkers is that I use commented curly braces around blocks
to make them easier to navigate and manipulate in the One True
Editor, vi(m).  I have tried learning emacs on several
occassions, and have to admit I have never been successful.

for i in range(10): #{
	print i
#}

I do the same thing with shell scripts.

for i in 1 2 3; do #{
	echo $i
done #}

This allows me to use the ``%'' key to jump to matching braces,
making it very easy to navigate around blocks, indent blocks, ...

It took me a while to learn my way around python after 15 years
of perl programming, but it wasn't too bad.  One book I found
fairly useful here as Martin C. Brown's ``Perl to Python
Migation''.  Other than that, my primary reference is the
documentation on the python.org web site (and reading other
people's code of course -- which is how I learned shell scripting
27 years agoin on Radio Shack Xenix).

...
Bill
-- 
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
Voice:          (206) 236-1676  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820
Fax:            (206) 232-9186  Skype: jwccsllc (206) 855-5792

When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.
    -- Harry Truman