The language vs. the environment

[Skip Montanaro]

    Paul> While we're at it, am I the only one bothered by how unsharp the
    Paul> boundary is between the language and the environment?  I'd
    Paul> consider things like sys.exc_info to be part of the environment,
    Paul> but there's no other way to get the info.

Paul,

I was thinking of much larger granularity things and things that are more
clearly separated from the language as delivered in python2.2.tgz or
python2.2.exe.  It appears you'd like to conisder the standard library as
part of the environment.  It is, certainly in a technical sense, but since
it is also part of the standard distribution, a semantic change there has a
much larger potential impact on programmers than, say an incompatible change
to a third-party package like PIL or MySQLdb.  So, I think it kind of
straddles the fence a bit and has to be considered in a slightly different
light.

Skip