On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 1:49 PM, Steven D'Aprano
I am still unclear what justification there is for having a separate sys.version (from PEP 421: "the version of the Python language") and sys.implementation.version ("the version of the Python implementation"). Under what circumstances will one change but not the other?
The PyPy example is the real motivator. It allows "sys.version" to declare what version of Python the implementation intends to implement, while sys.implementation.version may be completely different. For example, a new implementation might declare sys.version_info as (3, 3, etc...) to indicate they're aiming at 3.3 compatibility, while setting sys.implementation.version to (0, 1, etc...) to reflect its actual immaturity as an implementation. Implementations are of course free to set the two numbers in lock step, and CPython, IronPython and Jython will likely continue to do exactly that. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia