[Skip Montanaro]
It would be nice to keep the old Python implementations around for two reasons. First, there's the obvious educational value. Second, the PyPy folks will know where to find it when they need it. I think a Demo/Lib subdirectory (with appropriate README) would be a reasonable place to put such code out to pasture. It could be made available in source distributions but never installed.
[Barry]
The problem is that relegating stuff to Demo would very likely lead to bitrot, which is not a good thing. Another advantage of having current, working (and unit tested) pure-Python alternatives is that they are much easier to modify if you're experimenting with new features, or bug fixes, etc.
OTOH, some of the really ancient Python modules will occasionally need attention to bring them up to modern coding standards, idioms, and practices.
There a several ways to go: * have two visible modules like StringIO and cStringIO -- personally, I see the approach as clutter but it makes it possible to unittest both. * put the C module behind the scenes and import it into the python module while leaving the old code conditionally excluded or just commented out. * if the code is short, move it to the docs -- the itertools module has pure python equivalents in the docs -- that makes the code accessible and makes the docs more informative -- this might work for bisect and heapq where the amount of code is small. Raymond ################################################################# ################################################################# ################################################################# ##### ##### ##### ################################################################# ################################################################# #################################################################