True standard Windows app in Python?

[Alan Gauld]

On Mon, 29 Dec 2003 15:39:26 -0700, "Dave Brueck"
<dave at pythonapocrypha.com> wrote:
> > Well for example writing a fully windows compliant screne saver
> > is impossible using Python
> 
> You may find this link interesting then. :)
> 
> http://homepage.hispeed.ch/py430/python/index.html

Actually that's pretty darned impressive but from scanning the
code its not fully windows compliant because it doesn't include
the code to cover all the standard corner mouse clicks or
keyboard shortcuts, neither is it plumbed into the GINA(?) 
security module so far as I can tell to enable password control.
But OTOH that should be possible...

Now I confess I didn't install it and run it so maybe I'm doing
it an injustice. But certainly when I looked at writing a screen
saver I gave up when I discovered I couldn't even do it using
pure MFC, I had to drop into raw Win32... But I'm a wimp when it
comes to such things ;-)

> > Gives you access to the types but not the low level win32 APIs.
> 
> Are you sure you know what ctypes does? What "low level win32 APIs" are you
> referring to?

The win32 API calls that sit below MFC. In particular the device
IO ones for talking to PCI cards and the like.

And you are right I didn't realize all that ctypes could do, I'd
only seen it as a wrapper around the C typesystem - as per the
name! I didn't know, till now, that you could access DLL
functions, so in principle(albeit painfully) you should be able
to access all of the win32 API.

So yes, you could use Python to write a full windows compliant
program, OTOH I'm still not sure that I'd want to write C in
Python! :-)

Alan g.
Author of the Learn to Program website
http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld