Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Top 10 most common hard skills listed on resumes...
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2024 21:53:11 +0200
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
Lines: 38
Message-ID: <valar7$3404k$1@dont-email.me>
References: <vab101$3er$1@reader1.panix.com>
 <vad7ns$1g27b$1@raubtier-asyl.eternal-september.org>
 <vad8lr$1fv5u$1@dont-email.me> <vafmiv$202ef$1@dont-email.me>
 <20240825201124.000017a3@yahoo.com> <86msl05ctt.fsf@linuxsc.com>
 <vai0ur$2fqc5$1@dont-email.me> <vajl47$2rhoq$3@dont-email.me>
 <vak058$2t849$2@dont-email.me> <87h6b5epyb.fsf@nosuchdomain.example.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Injection-Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2024 21:53:11 +0200 (CEST)
Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="8355d15901bc9a80f13d9e1f7352f9f2";
	logging-data="3276948"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org";	posting-account="U2FsdGVkX188lo47eg+L9J9JAdsXt4FjG6jD1LFP8Fw="
User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird
Cancel-Lock: sha1:k+Wp2ZbZxAwzcrebW9sbmofeEac=
In-Reply-To: <87h6b5epyb.fsf@nosuchdomain.example.com>
Content-Language: en-GB
Bytes: 3151

On 27/08/2024 21:16, Keith Thompson wrote:
> David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> writes:
>> On 27/08/2024 06:36, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>>> On Mon, 26 Aug 2024 15:46:02 +0200, David Brown wrote:
>>>
>>>> Wikipedia classifies C as a high-level language that also supports a
>>>> degree of low-level programming, which I think is a fair assessment.
>>> The same could be said of Python.
>>
>> Python does not support any significant degree of low-level programming.
>>
>> A key example of low-level programming is control of hardware, which
>> on most systems means accessing memory-mapped registers at specific
>> addresses, reading and writing in specific orders.  Python has no
>> means to do any of that - C and C++ both provide this ability.
>> (Micropython, a subset of Python targeting microcontrollers and small
>> systems, has library modules that can do this.)
> 
> I've used Python's mmap module to access /dev/kmem on an embedded
> Linux system, accessing fixed addresses defined by an FPGA image.
> (The mmap module happens to be part of the core Python distribution.)
> 

There are /always/ ways to get around things (especially on Linux, where 
you have such "backdoors").  That is why I said Python does not support 
low-level programming to any /significant/ degree.  "low-level" vs. 
"high-level" is not a binary distinction.  Typically if you have Python 
code controlling some hardware, it is via a Python module with a C 
implementation, or with ctypes and an external shared library - not 
directly from Python.

> This is one of several reasons why we have different newsgroups for
> different langauges.
> 

Sure.  It's not really the place to get into details of other languages, 
but it is a thread that compares C to other languages.