The Hello World Selector
It’s now time for something a bit more useful (well, more entertaining, at least). This section presents a program that displays the basic syntax required by various programming languages to print the string “Hello World”, the classic language benchmark. To keep this simple, it assumes the string shows up in the standard output stream, not a GUI or web page. It also gives just the output command itself, not the complete programs. The Python version happens to be a complete program, but we won’t hold that against its competitors here.
Structurally, the first cut of this example consists of a main page HTML file, along with a Python-coded CGI script that is invoked by a form in the main HTML page. Because no state or database data is stored between user clicks, this is still a fairly simple example. In fact, the main HTML page implemented by Example 12-16 is really just one big pull-down selection list within a form.
Example 12-16. PP2E\Internet\Cgi-Web\Basics\languages.html
<html><body> <title>Languages</title> <h1>Hello World selector</h1> <P>This demo shows how to display a "hello world" message in various programming languages' syntax. To keep this simple, only the output command is shown (it takes more code to make a complete program in some of these languages), and only text-based solutions are given (no GUI or HTML construction logic is included). This page is a simple HTML file; the one you see after pressing the button below is generated by a Python ...
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