[Python-Dev] PEP397 no command line options to python?

[Paul Moore]

On 19 October 2011 00:18, Mark Hammond <skippy.hammond at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 18/10/2011 8:59 PM, Sam Partington wrote:
>> ... and I can imagine lots of users swapping "python" with
>> "py".
>
> Why would users choose to do that?  Using "python" presumably already works
> for them, so what benefit do they get?  If the main advantage is they can
> now use shebang lines, then the specific options the script wants can be
> expressed in that line.

I use "py" interactively rather than "python" because I have 2.7 and
3.2 installed, and py -2 or py -3 gives me the explicit version I want
without PATH hacking.

If 2.7 and 3.x provided python2 and python3 executables explicitly I
might not do this (I'm not at my PC right now so I can't recall if 3.x
provides python3.exe as well as python.exe, there was talk of this
certainly, but 2.7 definitely doesn't include python2.exe).

Having said that, I don't use other command line options much, so the
limitation doesn't bother me much (py -3 -m xxx would be the most
likely usage I'd miss...)

If the extra options really mattered to me, I could probably hack up a
Powershell alias easily enough, but py -V is available and does 99% of
what I need.

Paul.