Also, putting things into a main() I think can help organization quite a bit. A reminder of old C days, perhaps. It says “Here’s the main logic” to me.

And yes, it was ranty and the read-only/write-only thing was meant to be exactly as serious as you took it, CBT. Plus, I just thought it sounded good/funny. 🙂

However, the second that you come to a place where you need to construct a documented application that will need to be maintained for years, I would strongly recommend that you carefully consider Python. Those details that tend to get in your way with quick scripts are likely the very formalities that tend to help you maintain a full-scale application. (sure, it’s just opinion =)

And a clarification: an object needs to exist before it’s used. ie, In a function definition, you can reference a name from the global scope before it exists, but when you invoke that function, it had better be resolvable:

def foo():
return bar()
def bar():
return 1
print(foo())
del bar
print(foo()) # kaboom

so, if you wanted your main at the top of the script:

def main(args):
…
… reference things in the global scope …
…
return 0

… more def’s and other things that main refers to …

sys.exit(main(sys.argv))

Python is read only? I’ll accept that with as much seriousness as I accept Perl being write only. That is, none. It may be a fun dig, but it doesn’t really hold up to much analysis.

Functionally, I think Python is very similar to Perl. There are a lot of cultural differences, but the technical differences are negligible.

Oh, also, when I’m writing a command line program in Python, I like to have a main function that does all the actual work. That way I can define it at the top of the code and it isn’t hidden by my other function definitions.