Winer on MS scripting strategy: implications for Python.NET?

[Alex Martelli]

"Martin von Loewis" <loewis at informatik.hu-berlin.de> wrote in message
news:j4oformfee.fsf at informatik.hu-berlin.de...
> fluxent at yahoo.com (Bill Seitz) writes:
>
> > Thoughts?
>
> I know that python.net will be different, in language semantics, from
> CPython and Jython, and I guess that the differences will be larger
> than between the C and J variants. That won't pose a problem to users

I wonder -- the semantics of the JVM and MSIL aren't all that
far apart, after all.  It should be quite feasible to have a
Python.NET that's quite close to Jython in most respects.

> of Python.NET, since their code won't port to CPython, anyway, because
> the libraries are so dramatically different. Or, if they have portable
> code, why run it in Python.net, if you can run it in standard Python
> as well?

For example because there may well be platforms that run .NET
but not classic Python, if .NET has significant success -- e.g.
such devices as new-generation cellphones, etc, may well one
day come out .NET-enabled by default, while a port of Python
may be something between very hard and unfeasible.

> Selection of specific libraries always produces subcommunities,
> e.g. people that use PyQt, NumPy, SWIG, PyXML, PythonWin, ... will
> have code that is tied to those libraries. .NET won't be any different
> - it is just another set of libraries.

It's more than that, in the same way Jython is more than "just
another set of libraries" when compared to Classic Python.


Alex