[Python-Dev] Free threading (and tcl upvar) (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido@python.org
Thu, 09 Aug 2001 11:22:45 -0400

I recall you reporting that. It would be nice to have cross-platform pipes and exec, though i understand maintaining such non-portable code is too high a price to pay. I bet we went over this then, but i can't help but wonder whether an approach like tkinter, stealing the tcl code, would be a manageable approach? Mostly idle speculation, since i wouldn't have the time nor expertise to implement such a thing myself.

Tcl is a glue language that encourages you to glue external processes together. This is much less emphasized in Python, so I doubt that it will be as useful. I don't think it's worth the maintenance nightmare. Copying the Tcl code doesn't mean we have no maintenance -- the Tcl code undoubtedly uses lots of Tcl runtime convenience routines, which we would have to adapt to the Python runtime environment.

'upvar' is sick.

That's why we have sys._getframe(). ;-)

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)