case for open lang on win32 - fill in the table

[Mark Hammond]

Martijn Faassen wrote in message <7r0d3t$chk$1 at newshost.accu.uu.nl>...
>[followups set to comp.lang.python only]

Good move :-)  I recently cross-posted a Python question to the Perl groups
'cos I didnt look hard enough - was then honoured with an autoresponder
message from an tchrist. (:-)

>> multi thread        none              recent-ok    ?
>
>Python can do multithreading, though there's a global interpreter lock.
>Ask someone who knows more about multithreading than I do what this means.

Python is fully multi-threaded.  It wont perform as well as you may expect
on an SMP machine, but otherwise is fully thread safe.

>> file system access  no                yes          yes
>> basic locking       no (obviously)    flock        flock?
>
>Python has the fcntl module -- again, ask others for details as I'm
>not familiar with this. Seems limited to Unix.

Indeed it is.  There are no portable locking semantics, but there is full
support for locking (via the "msvcrt" module, or the win32file module.

>> idispatch only      yes               ?            ?

IDispatch plus about 100 extra interfaces.  We can not use raw interfaces if
there is no C++ support, but many useful interfaces already have that
support (and it is trivial to add new ones).  From a marketting POV, this
should definately read "yes" :-)

>> COM threading       STA only          STA only?    STA only?

No - full support for all COM threading models.  STA is the default.

>> project size        small to medium   big          big
>> (lines of code)
>
>What does that mean, lines of code? for COM, or in general?

Agreed = I would have to argue "small", especially compared to VB.  For
_anything_ other than GUI code (which VBScript doesnt do anyway) the LOC for
a Python solution will always be smaller than for VB.

Hope this helps...  Let us know if you complete this and post it to the web.

Mark.