Python or Ratsnake?

So is this language a Python or a Ratsnake? Actually Rat snakes are very harmless species of non venomous snakes. As the name suggests they eat rats and mice so if you see one slithering into your house you shouldn't chase it away. They are always welcome into mine. I spotted one in the store room about a month back.

As for python, it doesn't even have block quotes! Well people tell me that I don't need block quotes, and unlike ratsnakes, blockquotes are poison. Since Pythons aren't venomous the don't go together. That makes Python similar to Fortran and perl. Perl has other useful features not present in python, like the here document. But when you look closer you find that triple quotes can be used as a substitute. I know python fans will fall on my like a bunch of Anacondas for comparing python with Fortran. They seem to hate it.

One great advantage of PHP is that is dynamical typed which means a great disadvantage of PHP and of Python is that they are both dynamically typed (no I am not contradicting myself it's great when things go right, a huge pain when things go wrong). PHP has several functions to sort out the types mess but sometimes they give strange results.

I have seen programming language quizzes where they give you an expression with mixed types and ask you what the result is going to be. How stupid is that? No self respecting programmer is going to bother to figure out such code in his head.

I digress. The whole point of this was because of the trouble I was having finding the equivalent of print_r or var_dump of PHP in python. It was after some searching that I found it on a wierdly named site the function is repr. Who ever came up with that name?

I had more difficulty in finding the size of an uploaded file - sure, I know how to get the size after the file has been saved - but I need to know the size before saving - so far, the documentation hasn't thrown up anything. Sure you can get the size indirectly by us calling len() on the file data but it seems such a waste.