[IronPython] A Few Questions for the Python Community re Survey Response

[Jim Hugunin]

My answers are inline for your first four questions.  I don't have time to fill out the rest right now, but I thought that you'd rather have a partial answer than to wait on something more thorough that may or may not come.

Thanks - Jim



1) Can a developer extend the language by adding new keywords?

My answer to this is no, short of recompiling the underlying parser -- with
the new AST engine of 2.5, am I wrong?  Can Jython or IronPython do it?

JJH> IronPython can't do this, short of building a new parser.

2) How large is the on disk runtime that has to be installed to run
   programs written in this language?

I don't run either Jython or IronPython -- can anyone who does provide an
answer?  And yes, it is a bit unclear as in whether it includes all of Java
and .NET or just the delta above those.  Go with the delta, it's smaller.

JJH> IronPython-1.1 is roughly 1.4MB total in 3 dlls - and on Windows Vista, this is the FULL install size since .NET is already there.  Note that for IronPython the standard .py Python libraries are not included "in the box", so you may or may not want to add some version of that number to this.

3) What applications are available to developers using this language
   that support application lifecycle for requirements, design,
   development, build, and test?

JJH> IronPython has some integration with the VS tools suite, but it's very limited today.