Why is python not written in C++ ?

[Paul Rubin]

sturlamolden <sturlamolden at yahoo.no> writes:
> It is annyingly verbose, reminds me of Pascal (I hate the looks of
> it), and is rumoured to produce slow bloatware. 

The earliest Ada compilers were terrible, but they are about like C
compilers now, so the output code is ok (see Alioth shootout for
example).  I agree about the verbosity but I don't think that's too big
a problem in the sorts of systems that need to be written in such
languages.

> And don't forget Ariane 5 ;)

I have looked into that a few times and I do wonder whether the language
or release process could have been of any help.  One possibility is
using something like SPARK to ensure the absence of overflow exceptions.
Another is automatic test generation something like

  http://www.stanford.edu/~engler/klee-osdi-2008.pdf 

but that approach was probably unknown at the time.