Python Playing

I’ve been playing around with Python a bit more over the break, mostly because I want to be lazy in my code-writing for the forseeable future, plus I’d like to give NumPy a shot, but I want to have a solid background before trying that. One thing that just has not gotten old yet is the ability to assign functions absolutely anywhere in python. You can pass them around like variables, put them in dictionaries, return them from functions, whatever. I mean, I lived in parenthesis for a while in my scheme class, so it’s not like I haven’t been exposed to it, but it’s still damn cool. You can do cool stuff like making a tuple of some index, some value, and the function to process the other two. That makes it so much easier to deal with various combinations of neat datastructures. Anyways, the book I’ve been reading is Dive Into Python, off diveintopython.org. I’m currently at about page 114 out of 327, and I’ve fairly faithfully read most of it up until that point. The format seems slightly frustrating to me, but it’s probably just because it’s such a departure from what a lot of books and tutorials use. It seems helpful and worthwhile in any case.