Academic citation for Python

[Christopher Browne]

The world rejoiced as Ross Lazarus <do_not_use_this_as_it_does_not_work at bellatlantic.net> wrote:
> How should the Python language be cited in an academic publication?
>
> For example, in
> http://bioinformatics.oupjournals.org/cgi/reprint/17/8/756.pdf the
> author mentions http://www.python.org in the text rather than formally
> citing the primary source - or is that the appropriate primary source
> and recommended attribution?
>
> I found "Copyright 1991-1995 by Stichting Mathematisch Centrum,
> Amsterdam, The Netherlands" at
> http://www.python.org/doc/Copyright.html, but that doesn't seem as
> complete or helpful as I'd like for a refereed journal.
 
Unlike languages like Ada and FORTRAN and Common Lisp, the creation of
Python didn't start with the creation of a "de jure" standard,
documented in academic or government papers; it came as an
implementation.

I'm not sure that there's any fundamentally better "primary source" to
look to than <http://www.python.org/>.  

There might be some early paper by Guido van Rossum on Python that
would be of some value; that would be more likely to be a "secondary"
source, though.
-- 
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