Nice find. This looks like the best introduction to the language in the repo: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gvanrossum/abc-unix/refs/h...
Wow 2 * 1000 without rounding errors, 40 years ago this must have been super impressive, since I find that quite a feat of today's python.
2 * 1000 is 2000 ;)
I think you meant 2**1000
the syntax for formatting ate your star https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
Wow, I didn't know that you could write
like this for code blocksFor anyone else who, like me a moment ago, doesn't know the meaning of ** but is curious: it's how many (but not all) programming languages express "to the power of", aka 2**1000 = 2^1000
Oh that's why i did not get any upvotes /i
Extremely cool. Thanks, GvR.
For my own language design I've wanted to introduce some of this ABC syntax back into Python. Mainly for unpacking data and doing index/slice assignments; a lot of beginners seem to get tripped up because assignments in Python use the same syntax as mutations, so maybe it's better to write e.g. `a['b'] = c` like `set b = c in a`, or `update a with {'b': c}`, or ... who knows, exactly.
Interesting, seems like Python is a strict improvement over ABC though many things are very similar. The PUT ... IN ... and INSERT ... IN ... syntax looks quite clunky and un-composable, at least the examples never do more than one (high-level) operation per line. Also, I guess GvR's English wasn't that good at the time - it should be have been INTO, right?
"in" vs "into" is often just a matter of how casually you're speaking.
The same sort of syntax was used in HyperTalk (with "into"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTalk#Description I wouldn't be surprised to hear of it in AppleScript, either, although I can't recall.
The year says 91, but it looks like it was recently pushed to github, which is a notable event on its own.
Where is the GIL in this?