[Python-Dev] Computed Goto dispatch for Python 2 (original) (raw)

Donald Stufft donald at stufft.io
Thu May 28 20:33:59 CEST 2015

On May 28, 2015 at 2:11:02 PM, Terry Reedy (tjreedy at udel.edu) wrote:

On 5/28/2015 10:55 AM, Steve Dower wrote:

> And it would look like a 20MB+ file just for a simple 1KB Python > script... > > For Windows at least, I'd prefer to have some app-style installer > generation (e.g. http://pynsist.readthedocs.org/en/latest/) which, > combined with the embeddable Python distro (new for 3.5.0b1 in case > anyone missed it), can simply extract everything into an install > directory and run it from there. None of the items on the list above > are needed for or would help with this. What I wish, of course, is that Windows just came with Python3, the way that DOS came with BASIC, so people could publish and trade Python programs the way we once did with BASIC programs. Then a simple 1KB Python script would just take an extra 1KB on disk. To me, the removal of a simple, builtin programming language for everyone was the biggest Windows mistake. Failing that, maybe PSF & edu-sig could somehow encourage universities that requires students to have a computer to recommend or even require that Python be loaded so students could at least assume that others students have Python already loaded. Python is the BASIC of the 21 century. Somehow, trying to make it easier to have 50 duplicate copies of Python on a system seems the wrong direction to go. -- Terry Jan Reedy

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Honestly, I’m on an OS that does ship Python (OS X) and part of me hopes that they stop shipping it. It’s very rare that someone ships Python as part of their OS without modifying it in some way, and those modifications almost always cause pain to some set of users (and since I work on pip, they tend to come to us with the weirdo problems). Case in point: Python on OS X adds some preinstalled software, but they put this pre-installed software before site-packages in sys.path, so pip can’t upgrade those pre-installed software packages at all. 

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