Backwards emulation rather than backwards compatibility?

[Martin v. Loewis]

Tim Churches <tchur at optushome.com.au> writes:

> How about a Python meta-bytecode-compiler/interpreter which examines
> Python source code and/or bytecode and automatically sends the code to 
> the appropriate installed version of Python, resetting PYTHONPATH and
> any other aspects of the environment appropriately?

On Linux, this feature is available today: the binfmt_misc mechanism
allows easy dispatching to interpreters based on the magic inside the
file. Most of the recent Python version vary in file magic, for the
byte code.

Regards,
Martin