On Sun, Mar 1, 2015 at 2:33 AM, Mark Lawrence <breamore...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote: > > It also makes me wonder what idiot decided to use C as the language for the > first Python implementation? Or was it written in something else and then > ported?
Guido, probably. And what other language would you suggest? What other language has comparably extensive multi-platform support? Writing a Python implementation in C instantly makes Python available on all sorts of platforms, with direct access to native libraries on all of them. For example, CPython on Windows can make use of a whole bunch of Microsoft's win32 APIs, via the pywin32 extensions; meanwhile, CPython on Linux can use the inotify functions, again via an extension module (pyinotify or python-inotify). Jython doesn't offer that, as far as I know; or rather, Jython offers access to Java classes rather than to C libraries, and there are a lot more of the latter than the former. Of all the languages that offer convenient access to the same sorts of libraries that C code can (generally, those that compile to machine code and use the same kinds of linker information), which would you suggest as being better than C? C may not be perfect, but it's pretty decent at what it does. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
