David Mertz

Dr. David Mertz was the other individual banned from the Python Discourse forum, alongside myself, on Jul 19. In this open letter (published Oct 1), Dr. Mertz argues that Ms. Deb Nicholson (PSF executive directory, secretary, and board of directors member [1]; also a member of the PSF Code of Conduct Work Group [2]) acted improperly in removing him from his remaining volunteer role with the PSF (on the Trademark Work Group); and that her decision has foreseeable negative financial consequences for the Foundation. A short follow-up (from Oct 15) [3] criticizes a motion by the board apparently intended to give Ms. Nicholson such power retroactively, claiming that this is legally improper. [1]: https://www.python.org/psf/board/ [2]: https://www.python.org/psf/workgroups/#code-of-conduct-work-group [3]: https://gnosis.cx/publish/Board-of-Fools

I'm a big fan of Text Processing In Python, which has excellent chapters on a bunch of topics including regular expressions, parsers and even compression algorithms. It's available online (from the author's own website) here: http://gnosis.cx/TPiP/

Ads are acceptable though it may slow down site growth. If the ads don't get in the way of your users, they won't mind as much. Also, a donation button might be worthwhile as well; but don't expect it to make much money for you. Consider for example the sob story at the top of the page: http://gnosis.cx/TPiP/. Two donations out of 1,000 book downloads a month. If you can add some extra/useful features to the site, why not setup a premium subscription? Set the price low to start and that will likely get more revenue this way. Good luck!

They were unaware of it, or unwilling to talk about it, article from 2002, about changes introduced in 2001 https://gnosis.cx/publish/programming/metaclass_1.html https://www.python.org/download/releases/2.2/descrintro/

Here is another freely available book, Text Processing in Python: http://gnosis.cx/TPiP/ Plain text files and not tied to a library.

There have been some attempts to make a line oriented XML format so that shell tools work; doing the same thing with JSON is possible too; there are a few ways to do it. Have been meaning to give it a go at some point. In my view it makes more sense than building a new set of tools, especially as the Jshon ones do not really seem to compose properly. References for XML: http://www.lbreyer.com/unix_xml-1.html http://www.ofb.net/~egnor/xml2/ http://gnosis.cx/publish/programming/xml_matters_17.html

Yup. Just did actually about 15 minutes ago :) I just donated for an online Python book. This one: http://gnosis.cx/TPiP/ We found it useful. Also the fact that the guy was moaning that nobody gave made me do it :) Wonder if thats just marketing!

I think you misunderstood me completely. I was referring to a much more fundamental nature of compilation, not to any particular implementation technique. I agree that "a couple (because I assumed the OP meant this and not a single, giant regexp) of regexes with replace" is not a particularly often used implementation technique for compilers, but it is a workable one. For example, compiling some simple custom markup language to html is a good use case for this. Take a look at "Text processing in Python" (http://gnosis.cx/TPiP/) for a longer discussion. The `eval()` part is also nothing new or strange. There are many systems which let you input expressions, compile it and run. Scala does this, as does Nim, as did Forth for a longest time. In general compilation is not magic, on the contrary, it's conceptually simple and it's a good thing to know the basics. This is the view I wanted to express.

Text Processing in Python: http://gnosis.cx/TPiP/

Guido ~ http://www.artima.com/weblogs/index.jsp?blogger=guido David Mertz ~ http://gnosis.cx/publish/tech_index_cp.html Uche Ogbuji ~ http://www.xml.com/pub/au/84 & http://copia.ogbuji.net/blog/ Mark Pilgrim ~ http://diveintomark.org/ David Goodger ~ http://python.net/~goodger/

Free books: http://diveintopython.org/ http://gnosis.cx/TPiP/ (txt processing) http://www.swaroopch.com/byteofpython/ http://homepage.mac.com/s_lott/books/python.html http://homepage.mac.com/s_lott/books/oodesign.html