[Python-au] Re: FW: "Whiting, Jenny (INDEX)": Seeking your help

[Reinhold Quillen]

Thanks everyone for letting me know about SAS (see - this list is not dead after all.) I just knew that there was something missing in my 
life - now I am complete. 

I hope that Jenny finds a suitable candidate (well, the IT world is kinda slo-o-o-w right now, so she should not have too many problems finding someone.)

I have gone to the SAS corporate blurb site. Yep, it makes your 
coffee, walks your dog, cleans your house, etc (as long as you hand 
over a truckload of dosh) and generally makes your life heaven on 
earth (mind you, you have to hand over the dosh first.)

Jack, it sounds like you are correct, it is one of those little 
unpleasant things in life you may sometimes have to know about (like 
ASN.1 - which was designed by a committee - no doubt the same one 
which had a hand in designing the camel - err..., not the Perl camel 
of course.)

Me, I am just a simpleton. I just write multi-threaded socket and RPC servers, integrate UNIX and Windows boxes, set up the occasional DNS 
and mail servers (QMail, of course), and generally make a nuisance of myself (well, who is going to notice you, if you don't make a little 
noise.)

So far, I am quite happy with Python (just wrote a e-mail auto-
responder in Python, which can send back MIME e-mails - ahem, no not 
those sort of pictures, just ZIP files, although you can stick 
anything in.) 

If I would have written this thing in C, it would have taken much 
longer than with Python (of course, I could have used Perl as well, 
but I prefer to write robust code with full exception handling - 
Perl's exception handling "die" statement is a little too drastic for me. Perl's "eval" is just a wrapper around "die" anyway.) Python just shines in that regard - the Perl crowd 
could learn something from 
Python here.

Reinhold.