Re: Baby X is bor nagain

On 19/06/2024 21:42, Malcolm McLean wrote:

On 19/06/2024 18:49, David Brown wrote:

On 19/06/2024 18:52, Malcolm McLean wrote:
>

Yes, but that's not quite what we want. A typical input would go.

>
It's extremely hard to guess what you want (not "we", but "you" - no one else wants this kind of thing) when you have bizarre requirements and only give bits of them.  So modifying the Python code is left as an exercise if you are interested, especially as it is off-topic.
>

This was a work project, so "we". I would never set up such a system. But we hasd light-themed and dark-themed icons and they hsd to be arranged just so so that the program would find them and show the right theme. And as you can imagine, it was a nuisance to we programmers to set up the resource scripts so that eveything was right.
 So why not get Python to do the job? But there wasn't much enthusiasm. So, despite not knowing Python, I decided to have a go, and I got a sorted list of icons quite easily, and it looked promising. But now the special requirement for a little deviation from alphabetical sort. And I couldn't work out how to do that.
 And it wasn't what I was supposed to be doing or paid to do. We used to have a weekly meeting where we discussed work done. If I said "oh, and I spent an afternoon knocking up this little Python script to help get those resource files together", then that's OK. If I say that was my main focus for the week, no, and if I say I spent substantial time on it and it didn't even work - well that really wouldn't go down well.
So I had to abandon it once it became clear that it would take many hours of trawling through docs and online tips to try to work out a way. And no-one has posted a solution here. And, whilst there will be a way, I suspect that it just doesn't use the mainstream langage facilities. I suspect that Python isn't really a programming language - a language designed to make it easy to apply arbitrary transforms to data - it's a scripting language - a language designed to make it easy to call pre-existings code to do the things it is designed to do.
 But maybe I'm unfair.
 

No; I don't like Python either. It's big. It has lots of advanced, hard-to-grasp features. There's a dozen unwieldy, usually incompatible ways of getting anything done.
Pretty much everything can be assigned to (the only exception is reserved words). Because every user identifer (even if declared with def or class or module) is a variable.
Take a simple feature like a struct with mutable fields:
    typedef struct {int x, y;} Point;
How do you do that in Python; maybe a class:
    class Point:
        pass
    p = Point()             # create an instance
    p.x = 100               # fill in the fields
    p.qwghheghergh = 200
But here you type gobbledygook instead of 'y'; it still works! You can have an unlimited number of attributes.
Maybe a tuple is better, but those are indexed by number, not by name. So you use a module providing NamedTuples - except those fields are immutable. You can only update the lot.
Here's one I've just seen (that '@' line is a 'decorator'; don't ask me what it means):
   from dataclasses import dataclass
   @dataclass
   class Point:
      x: int
      y: int
   p = Point(10, 20)
   print (p)
This looks promising. Then I tried 'p.z = 30'; it still works. So does:
   p = Point("dog", "cat")      # what happened to those int types?
Maybe you need a struct type compatible with C; then you might try this:
   from ctypes import *
   class YourStruct(Structure):          # adapted from online example
       _fields_ = [('x', c_int),
                   ('y', c_int)]
It's just a big, ugly, kitchen-sink language. They throw in every feature they can think of (like C++, possibly why DB likes it) in the hope that somewhere in the mess is a solution to your needs.
I'm not surprised it takes 20MB to embed.