Notes from PySIG, 23-Feb-2007

[Ric Werme]

> Bill Sconce ran the general announcements and showed off difflib  
> module, a means of calculating the differences between two text files  
> and generating a resulting document. In the case of his demo, Bill  
> generated HTML, handy to view and print.

Other differences tools mentioned were xxdiff,
http://sourceforge.net/projects/xxdiff/ , and meld,
http://sourceforge.net/projects/meld .

I built both without trouble on my Suse 10.1 Linux system.  xxdiff looks very
good and closer to the first (and best) visual diff program we had on old
Tru64 Unix system, vdiff.  (New systems with a 16 pallete made vdiff coredump.
Very sad, source wasn't available.)

It comes with some small python scripts that are alleged to do interesting
things with xxdiff.  From what I've seen, they aren't useful.

Meld is a Python application and is somewhat prettier but slower than xxdiff.
I will probably use xxdiff more.  Neither let you print pretty diffs,
something that Ted would like.  (Or was it Bill?)  At any rate, that
HTML generator is a path to pretty-printed diffs.

> A remarkable (and not-remarked-on) item happened that evening, too:  
> presentations were made on Kent's new MacBook, running OS X, Bill's  
> ThinkPad running Linux and Fluxbox, and on Dave Rowell's Dell running  
> WinXP (in a VM, I think). Python ran just fine on all platforms.

Well, it's supposed to, right?  Whenever I learn a new language, I write an
interesting graphics hack that misdraws a curve called a rose.  The math is
only a few lines, but it makes for a nice reward.  For Python, I wrote one
with a clock driven vector drawer, various graphics boxes, etc. using the Tk
stuff.  Then, as a test, I installed Python and Tk on my Windows system and
was flabbergasted that my roses program "just worked".  It even looked better
thanks to a better font.  The Java version I wrote some nine years ago didn't
work last year, but that was due to some library changes made soon after that
I wrote that version in my first Java class.  (Class as in room with students
and a teacher, not "class roses."

So not only does Python work on the various platforms, so do Python apps.
Not news to Java programmers (kinda, sorta).  As long as a Python app
doesn't do OS-specific stuff, it should run on various platforms.  Now,
three different platforms talking to that projector - that _is_ a surprise.

      -Ric Werme