[Python-Dev] __file__

[Glenn Linderman]

On approximately 2/26/2010 2:55 PM, came the following characters from 
the keyboard of Brett Cannon:
>
>     Maybe Greg's and my response to the mention of dropping this feature
>     is too strong -- after all we're both dinosaurs. And maybe the
>     developers who want the feature can write their own loader.
>
>
> We could also provide if necessary.

So if the implementation stores .pyc by default in a version-specific 
place, then it seems there are only two things needed to make a python 
byte-code only distribution...

1) rename all the .pyc to .py
2) packaging

When a .pyc is renamed to .py, Python (3.1 at least) recognizes and uses 
it... I assume by design, rather than accident, but I don't know the 
history.

I didn't experiment to discover what __file__ and __cached__ get set to 
in this case (especially since I don't have a version with the latter :) ).

I speculate that packaging a distribution in this manner would be 
slightly different that how it is currently done, but I also suspect 
that it would avoid the same half of the stat calls, to aid performance.

-- 
Glenn -- http://nevcal.com/
===========================
A protocol is complete when there is nothing left to remove.
-- Stuart Cheshire, Apple Computer, regarding Zero Configuration Networking