Another cheer for Python! I ported a C++ daemon that wouldn't compile cleanly on Pair Networks' FreeBSD systems (old version of GCC and the STL) to Python in two days (my first Python program!) and: * code was 200 lines of code vs 500 of C++ and all in one file instead of 5 files of C++ * code ran _much_ faster, partially due to this feature: my_list = ["Alpha", "Beta", "Gamma"] if "Epsilon" in my_list: <-- 'in' is a godsend print "Uh-oh, something's really wrong here" (I was too lazy to use a binary search routine in C++, so I hit the database server several hundred times) * things like data = urllib.urlopen("http://www.debian.org") replaced 20 lines of C++ code that used the GNOME-specific libghttp1 (another thing to compile/install on their system) * the regexp .{5}\s+(\d{3,4})p?\s+(?:\d{3,4}p?)?\s*\w{2}\s+(?:(?:( \d{2})-(\d{2}))|Life)\s+<A.*USCF/(\d{8}).*/A>(?:\s+.{5}\s+(\d{3,4}) \s*(?:\d{3,4}p?)?)? saved me almost a hundred lines of text parsing.
Did I mention I like Python a lot? My next project..developing an admin system using Python and wxWindows. I can develop under Linux and deliver it to my client running Windows without changing the code..do that with any other language (including the much-acclaimed JDK/Swing combo!) -- Stephen Pitts [EMAIL PROTECTED] webmaster - http://www.mschess.org