On 1/29/2010 5:55 PM, Collin Winter wrote:
Hey Terry,
On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 2:47 PM, Terry Reedy<tjre...@udel.edu> wrote:
Several years, there was serious consideration of switching to a
registerbased vm, which would have been even more of a change. Since I
learned 1.4, Guido has consistently insisted that the CPython vm is not part
of the language definition and, as far as I know, he has rejected any
byte-code hackery in the stdlib. While he is not one to, say, randomly
permute the codes just to frustrate such hacks, I believe he has always
considered vm details private and subject to change and any usage thereof
'at one's own risk'.
No, I agree entirely: bytecode is an implementation detail that could
be changed at any time. But like reference counting, it's an
implementation detail that people have -- for better or worse -- come
to rely on. My only point was that a switch to wordcode should be
announced prominently in the release notes and not assumed to be
without impact on user code.
Of course. If it does not already, What's New could routinely have a
section Changes in the CPython Implementation that would include any
such change that might impact people. It could also include a warning to
not depend on certain details even if they are mentioned.
tjr
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