[Python-Dev] 3.2.1 encoding surprise (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Thu Jul 21 10:47:57 CEST 2011

On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 6:06 PM, Glenn Linderman <v+python at g.nevcal.com> wrote:

Interesting, David, that you feel it that Python usability on Windows should be limited to its usability on Unix, rather than to exceed it. I don't see that as a necessary or appropriate limit.  Windows and Unix are different. Unix people are accustomed to using tools like which, and using command lines, and path manipulations; Windows people are not.  So the use of the command line is already somewhat foreign to them, and limiting the launcher so that they have to use other command line tools to get the work done, would only serve to frustrate them.  Now the argument can possibly be made that people that want to use launcher from the command line would be those that are already command line experts might be realistic, but I will note that Perl has a -S option to find its script on the PATH, not that that is a sufficient reason to add such to Python, or even to the launcher, but just to note that there are at least some people besides myself that might think that is a friendly idea.

If a PEP is put forward proposing such a feature, with a reference implementation that supports at least Windows, *nix and OS X and works for at least the 4 script types understood by the CPython executable without a command line option (source and bytecode files along with directories and zipfiles providing top level main modules), then I'd be prepared to moderate my response all the way to a +0 (reserving the extreme negative reaction for proposals that are either platform specific or only handle some script types).

I believe that is significantly easier said than done, though.

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia

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