On 7 March 2011 01:18, Mark Hammond <skippy.hammond@gmail.com> wrote:
That said though, I'm only -0 on python2.exe/python3.exe - I don't think it will hurt, but also don't think it will help that much in practice. It may also turn out to be unnecessary should a "complete" solution be implemented - eg, a "python launcher" which (a) read the shebang lines and (b) allowed something like "python -3" on the command-line would render both python3.exe and requests to have multiple installed Python versions on the PATH redundant.
That sounds like a fairly cool idea. So if I follow what you're suggesting, we'd have a single python.exe, probably installed in system32, which did the necessary command line juggling and shebang parsing, then simply redirected to the appropriate Python interpreter? Presumably that launcher would be pretty version independent, so (a) the one that gets installed with Python 3.3 would support older versions even though they didn't include the launcher themselves, (b) overwriting the launcher when a new version of Python is installed wouldn't be too big a deal, and (c) it could be released as a standalone package for people with only older versions of Python installed? I like this idea. If I had the spare time (I don't :-() I'd work on this myself. +1 from me. Paul.