On Tue, May 16, 2017 at 9:54 AM, Gregory Ewing <greg.ew...@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote: > There's also the fact that Microsoft doesn't make the free > versions of Visual Studio available forever and forbids anyone > else distributing them, so sufficiently old versions are > simply not available to most people.
Yes and no. The Python.org support policy is that Python X.Y will be supported on Windows Z if and only if Windows Z was supported by Microsoft as of when Python X.Y.0 was released. This means that, for instance, Python 3.3 supported Windows XP, but Python 3.7 won't. If you need a Win2K-compatible compiler, you're using a too-old version of Python, and nobody's going to support that. There is, however, one exception. Python 2.7 supports Windows XP, and a specific version of MSVC (I don't remember which off-hand) that is now unsupported by Microsoft. However, *specifically for Python extension developers*, Microsoft offers the zero-dollar version of that compiler still, and will for a decent while (again, I don't remember the specifics, but it's something comparable to Py2.7's own upstream support). So in general, "sufficiently old versions" should actually still be available. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
