Hello people. I have some questions

[Alex Martelli]

"Markus Schaber" <markus at schabi.de> wrote in message
news:2163005.EU6C4ouqhe at lunix.schabi.de...
    ...
> > VB (and Python) stop where there's no runtime environment to
> > support them (C++, like C, is designed to be able to do without
    ...
> > Say you'd like a little program of yours to run in the browser
> > of anybody who looks at your site.  VB will stop at any browser
    ...
> If you use Jython and AWT as windowing toolkit (maybe swing is also
> possible in current browsers), than you can ship a carefully designed
> python application as .jar, even as an applet, if you want to. There's

...and if a suitable runtime environment is provided.  Most
current browsers don't provide one by default -- the JVM's they
pack (if any) are old and cranky and don't run Jython applets.

So, again, the "runtime environment for support" issue dominates
deployment considerations: in this case, you'd need to make
sure (how...?) that every visitor to your site is using a
reasonably recent, bug-free JVM (presumably as a plugin).

Of course, although in theory C++ or C could produce code that
is able to avoid the need for (software) runtime environments,
that code would need suitable *hardware* support (e.g., an 8088
will not run 32-bit code needing an 80386 or better -- a Mac
won't support it either, etc, etc) *AND* you'd have to convince
the visitor that your compiled binary is safe to download and
run (good luck trying:-).

So, the need for suitable supporting runtime-environments (if
one counts hardware issues, trust issues, and so on, as part of
those) is really universal... no language will let you make
programs that run *EVERYWHERE* -- the needed support may be
reasonably widely deployed, but it won't be universal.


Alex