Bits of py

Dear Kiwibank, My suggestion isn't actually sensitive hence posting it on my blog. This could be a game changer for Kiwibank though. I want support for requesting payments. I've run into "POLi" before, and it's rubbish - the fact it requires a particular operating system and browser, requires letting untrusted third-party code log into the user's bank account and "take control". Terrible for an untrusting geek like myself who wants to pay for a flight... I realize POLi isn't the problem, or a Kiwibank product, but it is the current best solution because no bank is willing to lead and create a proper (and secure) solution to real time paying with online banking. It would be a great benefit to many people, including trademe users, and small businesses who might need to take payments and deposits online. Heres how I imagine it could work: People wanting paid would be able to go to kiwibank.co.nz set up and email their payment request/invo...

There is certainly some confusion with sockets, as my flatmate put it; sockets connect stuff together right? Wikipedia puts it a little clearer with: sockets are inter-process communication endpoints That sounds pretty boring but I promise you can do some fairly interesting things with them. Sockets are a core part of the operating system, and a socket API is used to direct how the operating system should use sockets. So the hello world of sockets would have to be an echo server. Let's create a basic Python3 socket server that will listen on IPv6 and repeat what it hears. The Python Howto guide for sockets starts with this: Sockets are used nearly everywhere, but are one of the most severely misunderstood technologies around. On the server side, you follow these steps: Create a socket (possibly after querying the system for information) Bind the socket, which assigns the socket to an address Listen prepares it for incoming connections Accept an incoming connec...

About a year ago I read a programming post by Peter Norvig: (How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (in Python)) , being a Python programmer, of course I had to try write my own Lisp interpreter as a way to learn lisp. My implementation is relatively short, but can do some surprisingly complex things like this Y Combinatorial Factorial from wikipedia (which is one of my unittests): ( begin ( define Y ( lambda ( f ) (( lambda ( x ) ( f ( lambda ( v ) (( x x ) v )))) ( lambda ( x ) ( f ( lambda ( v ) (( x x ) v ))))))) ( define fact ( Y ( lambda ( f ) ( lambda ( n ) ( if ( = n 0 ) 1 (* n ( f (- n 1 )))))))) ( fact 10 ) ) I've recently dug up the files, rinsed them off, and put them on my bitbucket account. The reason I took another look at this project was my desire to translate it with Pypy . After having to battle just to get the tokeniser into valid RPython to translate I'v...