Python's grammar looks imposingly complex from the outside, but themore I've thought about it the more I've realized that it's simple butclever. In particular, the way the work is split between the tokenizerand the actual grammar simplifies both.

(Technically you could claim that Python's grammar is straightforwardbecause the tokenizer takes care of all the hard bits , but I consider this ducking the issue.)

The actual grammar istypical for an Algol-style language. You have the

In an earlier entry I gave short and long termreasons why I think that thin clients were doomed. Now it's timefor the high-level third reason (which occurred to me only afterI'd written ThinClientDoom , or it might have been in there too).

So far, people have always found productive uses for new computingcapabilities and more computing power; time and time again, sillycapabilities have turned out to have important uses, to the point wherethey've become ubiquitous. Betting on

To do simple locking in shell scripts, you need an atomic system callthat fails if the target already exists, and that is directly exposedin a utility program. Ignoring for a moment what System V did to ln , there are two good candidates on modern Unix systems: link(2) and mkdir(2) .

Mkdir is actually the better of the two (because you don't have tofiddle around with temporary files), but ln is the more common one,probably for two reasons:

1. with