[Python-Dev] Path PEP: some comments (original) (raw)

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Sun Feb 5 06:06:28 CET 2006

"Phillip J. Eby" <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote in message news:5.1.1.6.0.20060204160108.0410c758 at mail.telecommunity.com...

Note that this is the opposite of normal Python policy: Python does not attempt to create cross-platform abstractions, but instead chooses to expose platform differences.

I had the opposite impression about Python -- that it generally masks such differences. Overall, I see it as a cross-platform abstraction. The requirement that ints be at least 32 bits masked the difference between 16-bit int and 32-bit int platforms, in a way that C did/does not. I am pretty sure that Tim Peters has said that he would welcome better uniformity in binary float computations, but that he won't do the work needed. The decimal package attempts to completely mask the underlying platform. Cross-platform guis, whether written in Python or just accessible from Python, also mask differences. The os module has names like sep and pathsep precisely so people can more easily write platform independent code. And so on.

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