Why do we call python a scripting language?

Fred Pacquier fredp at multimania.com.nospam
Sat Aug 28 16:52:02 EDT 1999


someone at someplace.com (Someone) said :

>>for the profane. The one app that 'did it' for me, curiously, is PySol.
>>It's a game, but a game engine, and a powerful one. And it shuffles
>>around a lot of graphics (pun intended), which may surprise people
>>biased by the 'scripting language' tag.
>
>This brings me to a new point.  since I first used python, I've been
>wondering about distribution of my final products.  In general, i dont
>want to distribute a full python distribution and all my source, as
>much from not wanting to burden the user with this task as for
>protecting my source.  I've played with freeze, but since I never
>really had anything to distribute, I've never really used it for
>anything except play things.  But from what I remember, there is
>nothing preventing a person from putting into a small package
>everything needed to distribute an app.
>But what I find most interesting is that I havent seen much evidence
>that any one uses it.  Is any one using freeze or some derivative or
>work alike?  Most things I find are written for users of python, and
>are just distributed as source.

That's also part of it, I guess. Say you Whip out a nice little game, say a 
200K archive (py code, bitmaps, docs), then what next ? You put it up on 
your Web page, with a note saying "Oh, by the way, you also need to 
download and install the X-Meg Python engine and the Y-Meg wxPython library 
to run this on" ?
Probably a put-off for many non-Python casual users. Microsoft can get away 
with it (think VB, MFC DLLs...), but for everyone else...
I've never even looked into freeze, but my understanding is that it's not 
trivial to set up, or am I wrong ?

>>Yet another selling point might be if IDLE or PythonWin or some other
>>seed came to evolve into a full-blown IDE up to par with Microsoft's or
>>Borland's, that might impress the developer population. After all, VC++
>>is done in MFC/C++ and Delphi in ObjectPascal, right ? But I seem to
>>recall this was all discussed to death some months ago... :-)
>I'm very impressed with what I am seeing on the python win 2 beta
>site.  its very impressive!  

Ah, yes. I visited there some time ago and though I needed to try that out, 
but I keep forgetting...

-- 
YAFAP : http://www.multimania.com/fredp/




More information about the Python-list mailing list