It is indeed an eye-roller. But it's more a Python eye-roller than a Microsoft or Windows eye-roller. If I remember correctly, it was Owen who some months ago pointed out some unfortunate aspects of the Python ecology. On the one hand, Python is very open to adding modules written in compiled languages such as C++. However, for such foreign modules you have to use the same compiler that was used to build the target Python (and you have to prepare different versions for different versions of Python); you mostly don't have such problems with modules written in Python. I could in principle build Python myself from source, using any compiler I liked on Windows, but there are lots of downsides to that, especially that other people's compiled modules wouldn't work with my Python. For lots of reasons, VPython is built to go with official python.org releases.
An additional complication is the break between Python 2.x and Python 3.x, which in order to clean up some stuff is deliberately (though mildly) incompatible with the 2.x series. For 64-bit Python built on wxPython I have to use the older Python 2.7 at the moment, because wxPython for Python 3.x hasn't yet been released -- a general annoying problem in the Python world, that modules lag Python. I guess for historical reasons, both the 32-bit and 64-bit Python 2.7 are built with the old 2008 version of Visual Studio, for which 64-bitness apparently wasn't fully developed, especially in the free version of the compiler that I use. So the Python module situation is Not Good. Bruce On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 10:09 AM, Douglas Roberts <[email protected]>wrote: > > On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 10:06 AM, Bruce Sherwood > <[email protected]>wrote: > >> In the case of 64-bit Python on Windows, that compiler is a rather old >> version of Visual Studio which required arcane edits of various Visual >> Studio configuration files on my machine. >> >> Bruce >> > > <rolls eyes> > > -- > *Doug Roberts > [email protected]* > *http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins*<http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins> > * <http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins> > 505-455-7333 - Office > 505-672-8213 - Mobile* > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com >
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