On Tue, 08 Jun 2010 18:12:05 -0700, geremy condra wrote: > I didn't argue that Tcl is bad. I argued that a dependency on it is bad > for python. Would you argue that Python should ship with Perl and Java > because there are best-of-breed tools in those languages and python > could leverage that? Of course not.
Surely that depends on the tool, how difficult it would be for Python to duplicate the functionality, and how important it is to provide the tool as a standard product. In any case, Python doesn't ship with Tcl and Tk. They are dependencies *only if you use Tkinter*. It's not compulsory. [st...@sylar ~]$ python2.6 Python 2.6.4 (r264:75706, Feb 1 2010, 13:33:07) [GCC 4.1.2 20070925 (Red Hat 4.1.2-27)] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import Tkinter Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/lib-tk/Tkinter.py", line 39, in <module> import _tkinter # If this fails your Python may not be configured for Tk ImportError: No module named _tkinter Now, we might argue that the Python standard library "must" have a GUI toolkit, in which case it's going to have some non-trivial dependency. I don't see why it's so much worse to depend on Tcl/Tk compared to some other external toolkit. And even if it were undesirable to rely on any external toolkit, I don't think it's terribly likely that with the resources available to the PSF anyone is going to create Yet Another GUI Toolkit specifically for Python. We might agree that, in a perfect world, it would be nice if Python had no external dependencies at all (well, apart from the OS of course), but it isn't going to happen anytime soon. Not unless you're volunteering? :) -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list