Oh Python, you seemed to have learned so much from Scheme, Common Lisp, Standard ML and Haskell and, yet so very little. I suppose you are jut one of many language that failed to learn from those that came before.

I'm trying to like you, really I am. I have even forgiven you (mostly, but not really) for using indentation to indicate block structure. It was cute at first, but it quickly became droll.

You have many nice features that are so trivial to implement in an interpreter, yet so hard to deal with efficiently in a compiler. Please go back and review Common Lisp, especially the CLOS meta-object protocol (MOP). You can have your cake and eat it too; it just requires more attention to detail than you are apparently able to muster.

If you are willing to change, we could have a relationship.

First off, please for the love of god, fix your lexical scoping rules for looping. In particular, fix list comprehension. List comprehensions should never modify anything in the enclosing lexical environment. I was scandalized when I found out that this expression modifies (or creates) the binding of q in the current environment.

[whatever(q) for q in x]

What were you thinking? You disgust me.

You've made me write all of my list comprehensions in a closure like this:

(lambda: [whatever(q) for q in x])()

to avoid nasty surprises and to prevent polluting my namespace. (Please look up referential transparency in your favorite programming systems text book.)

But, admit, at least to yourself if not to the world, that this models how list comprehension should work by default. (And I won't mention that you, you dumbass, would be able to compile this expression more efficiently with these semantics as well. Oops, I guess I did mention it.)

Orion
by Susan Gevirtz

        What you make on Orion

              I leave to you

       What you take from Orion

               I take to you

                                                    Far far away where the swans fly to when we
 are having winter, lived a King who had eleven sons and one daughter

                             Hans Christian Andersen

                      in the greening time

there was once

           there was a 

      because we didn’t

                           Turn on the light

There was trespass

            We didn’t

Unadorned             Side is his wife

         Bellatrix are the shoulder stars

                    Drape the mantle of the remarkable nebula

Take first

cause 

is effect

              once  mishap misshape

But let us not talk in the language of evidence

sleep deprivation           vigilance         the screen and the Styrofoam king

             of airspace  

                                         renames the sky

documentary to which all words refer

          escapes us          near or newer air

From Aerodrome Orion by Susan Gevirtz.

ch@snaggle:~$ cat .lessfilter
#!/bin/sh

case "$1" in
    *.gpg)
        gpg -d "$1"
        ;;
    *)
        exit 1
esac

exit 0

Two 19th century rhino horns stolen from a South African museum could be deadly if sold as a popular aphrodisiac because they are drenched in poison, a museum official said on Monday.

The Assignation

by Ciaran Carson

I think I must have told him my name was Juliette,
with four syllables, you said, to go with violette.

I envisaged the violet air that presages snow,
the dark campaniles of a city beginning to blur

a malfunctioning violet neon pharmacy sign
jittering away all night through the dimity curtains.

Near dawn you opened them to a deep fall and discovered
a line of solitary footprints leading to a porch:

a smell of candle-wax and frankincense; the dim murmur
of a liturgy you knew but whose language you did not.

The statues were shrouded in Lenten violet, save one,
a Virgin in a cope of voile so white as to be blue.

As was the custom there, your host informed you afterwards-
the church was dedicated to Our Lady of the Snows.