Python aliases under Windows?

[Ian Kelly]

On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 9:00 AM, Kirill Balunov <kirillbalunov at gmail.com> wrote:
> In fact, I do not really understand why the _py launcher_ way is easier or
> better than `python3` or `python3.6` way even on Windows. There are already
> `pip.exe`, `pip3.exe`, `pip3.6.exe` which solve the same problem,  but they
> are all redundant, when it is better to use `python3.6 -m pip ... ` or
> currently `py -3.6 -m pip install ...`.

Because py.exe is really meant to solve a slightly different problem.
On Unix if you have a .py script and you run it directly, without
specifying which interpreter to use, the convention is to start the
script with a shebang line, and the kernel will transparently use the
interpreter specified there. Windows, however, doesn't respect shebang
lines and instead associates programs with files by file extension.

Here's the problem: Python 2 files have a .py extension. Python 3
files also have a .py extension. Windows doesn't allow both Python
binaries to be associated with the same extension. So how can we set
things up so that launching a Python file will invoke the correct
Python version? To solve this, Python ships with py.exe and associates
*that* with the .py extension. py.exe knows what Python versions are
installed, and it inspects the shebang line to decide which one to run
for this particular script.

The fact that py.exe can also intelligently select versions from
command line arguments is just an added bonus.