GIL and uniprocessor machines

[Joe Cheng]

Hi everyone,

(I'm a Python newbie so please bear with me...)

I was wondering about the effect of the global interpreter lock on
single-processor machines.  Clearly on a multi-processor machine, not
being able to have each processor crunching bytecode instructions is a
(potential) bottleneck.  But a (non-hyperthreading) single-processor
machine can only deal with one thread at a time anyway, right?  So the
GIL should actually not be a restriction at all in that case?

This might be a dumb question... sorry.  I am a Java/C# programmer who
wants to add Python to the toolbox, and I am trying to establish what
kinds of problems are most appropriate for Java over Python and vice
versa.

Thanks-

joe