Dick Moores wrote: > At 06:13 PM 8/9/2007, Ben Finney wrote: >> It's important to also realise that the language is *deliberately* >> non-committal on whether any given value will have this behaviour; >> that is, it's entirely left to the language implementation which >> optimisation trade-offs to make, and the language user (that's you and >> I) should *not* expect any particular behaviour to hold between >> different implementations. > > I'm not clear on the meaning of "implementations" > here. Would 2.5 for Windows, Mac, Linux all be > different implementations? Would Iron Python be another? ActivePython?
(Note that I'm jumping into this without having read the thread, so apologies if I didn't grasp the question in its proper context.) Separate Python "implementations" generally refers to a separate source code base for that Python build. According to that definition, current examples of Python implementations are: CPython (from python.org, C-based), Jython (Java-based), Stackless Python (I'm not that familiar to how much of the CPython source code, if any, Stackless borrows), IronPython (.NET/C#-based), possibly PyPy (Python-based, I'm not that familiar with it). Also eventually interesting might be the recently announced IronMonkey (http://wiki.mozilla.org/Tamarin:IronMonkey). Windows, Mac, Linux, etc. installations/builds/installers of a particular implementation would be different platform *builds* (my language). ActivePython is a separate (from python.org's) *distribution* of CPython -- i.e. the sample implementation as CPython (same source code). This is similar, in some respects, to SuSE, Debian, RedHat, Ubuntu, etc. being different distributions of Linux. Trent -- Trent Mick trentm at activestate.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list