Jay Tee wrote: > > Paul, thanks for this, I didn't realize the scope of the situation. I > agree with your assessment to the extent that I understand what the > whole python 3.0 thing is about.
I don't know if I've delimited the scope of any situation, really. However... [...] > The fact that there are three (or > four depending if you count Linz V4) different Oberon System > implementations, and several different compilers, and even four or > five separate dialects of Oberon with none of them appearing to be > really "official", [...] The fortunate thing about different Python implementations and in contrast to a lot of other languages and their implementations is that the most actively developed Python implementation, CPython, is very portable and is present on all major operating systems of consequence (capable of running it). Other languages have suffered because there'd be a UNIX version and then a version for Windows or the Mac which wasn't as well maintained, or perhaps no version at all for one or more of these platforms. So with Python, even if one implementation is lagging behind (eg. Jython) there's still likely to be some deployment solution on one's operating system of choice, given some level of flexibility. Where incompatibilities may arise with Python implementations is in the level of support for recent language developments and additions. Again, CPython's portability prevents this from becoming an operating system issue, but we see rifts between implementations targeting different runtime platforms, and whilst CPython 2.x and CPython 3.x may continue to cover similar operating systems (although a desire to drop support for various operating systems was stated), it's the rift between them that presents the risk to any common notion of what Python actually is. Paul -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list