When looking up names on objects, I really wishthat Python had a special attribute accessor for looking upattributes it was about to call, instead of only running them throughthe regular attribute lookup chain.

While this uniformity probably has little effects on mostcode, it complicates the life of things such as proxy objects thattrace and monitor access to objects, which sometimes want to behavedifferently for ' var = you.foo ' than for ' var = you.foo() '. You canfake this by returning

One reason that I like Python is that I find it what I call a very'computer science' language and I am a product of a CS environment. Bythis I mean that Python is mostly built from a small number of coreconcepts which are uniformly expanded through the language, and thosecore concepts are by and large familiar to me from my CS background.

(It also has a quite traditional Algol-style syntax, apart from thewhitespace issue.)

Since its core concepts click for me, I find

The crontab file format is unfortunately prone to mistakes, since itrequires you to carefully count words and, for bonus fun, requires adifferent number of words in different contexts. There are three classiccrontab syntax mistakes that I have seen (and sometimes committed):

• adding a username when it's not necessary

  This generally results in mail from cron complaining that it cannotrun ' username '.

• failing to specify a username when it's necessary

  This results in mail about 'no such user program ', assuming that