Am I the only one who would love these extentions? - Python 3.0 proposals (long)

[Alex Martelli]

Paul Rubin wrote:

> Alex Martelli <aleax at aleax.it> writes:
>> That's one of the benefits that the pypy project is intended to
>> provide: a "reference implementation" that's easiest to play with
>> for exactly such purposes as the experiments you mention.  And --
>> we do hope to release pypy 1.0 before Christmas...!
> 
> Interesting and cool.  During the early discussion of Pypy it sounded
> as if Pypy was specifically *not* intended for such purposes.  It'll
> be great to see what comes out.

At http://codespeak.net/pypy/index.cgi?doc you can already see a
lot of what comes out...!-)

In particular, re a "reference implementation", at:
http://codespeak.net/pypy/index.cgi?doc/funding/B3.impact.html

you can read...:

"""
Guido van Rossum has expressed interest in giving PyPy the status of
'implementation standard' (executable specification) of the Python
programming language. 
"""

and the quotation from Guido:

"""
It is even possible that PyPy will eventually serve as an "executable
specification" for the language, and the behavior of one of PyPy's object
spaces will be deemed the correct one.
"""

Whether or not one of pypy's object spaces is ever officially blessed
as the "executable specification", aka "implementation standard", you
can see that many of the work-packages under B6.7 have to do exactly
with the "easiest to play with ... for such purposes as experiments"
nature of pypy.  Of course, we'll be able to develop the project's
ambitious objectives only if we obtain the EU funding we have requested
under "IST-2002-2.3.2.3 - Open development platforms for software and
services" (indeed, all the general and detailed plans & projections
you'll see on the webpage were developed mostly to submit to the EU a
good proposal -- it IS, however, a nice side effect that our plans and
ambitions are now spelled out with such extreme precision:-).

Still, we _have_ gone farther than most would have expected without yet a
scrap of funding from anybody -- each participant covering his or her own
travel & accomodation expenses to the Sprints... -- and we'll keep trying
to do our best come what may, in typical open-source spirit!


Alex