Python aliases under Windows?

[Terry Reedy]

On 4/3/2018 11:43 AM, Ian Kelly wrote:
> 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

These are put in the pythonxy/Scripts directory.  So they only work if 
the pythonxy/Scripts directory is on the path.  But there really should 
only be 1 such directory on the path.  Otherwise, the meaning of pip.exe 
and pip3.exe depends on the order of the multiple /Scripts directories.

>> are all redundant, when it is better to use `python3.6 -m pip ... ` or
>> currently `py -3.6 -m pip install ...`.

Because the last works with multiple python installations.

> 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.

I consider it essential, as I often run scripts with more than one 
version, so baking a version into the script is wrong.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy