Hi Walter,

recently I had to do some maintainance on a python program, and I was very impressed with the language as such.

No internal database (but what other language has), but drivers for nearly every important database are there. Hash tables/collections and arrays are a integral part of the language, and you have shortcuts like acopy() built directly into the language. Very dynamic: evaluate() and function pointers which in vfp always force an evaluate() or macro expansion. Runs mostly as interpreted bytecode (CPython) or gets compiled to JIT-ing JVM's (Jython, PythonNet, IronPython).

Control structures are defined by indentation (very easy to read and write, not enough expirience on my side to comment on "fragility" due to errors from deleting white space) which started the biggest "thinking pause" to get a personal opinion.

Run time speed in the league of vfp, often a touch better (function overhead, class construction) and much better when support is built directly into the language (reversing strings, hashtable access) which is the same for vfp and data access. Many GUI toolkits - Feels like early xBase, but on a higher level... Very portable. Has Jython, which can directly access java classes and vice versa. Very good possibilities for speed enhancement of critical parts: direct interface to c and some pseudo compilers... Was fun to do.

my 0.02 EUR

thomas