Re: [Visualpython-users] Progress toward wxPython

[Mark A. <dre...@gm...>]

On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 11:03 PM, Bruce Sherwood
<Bru...@nc...> wrote:
> I'm curious: I don't know what you're referring to when you say that
> the problem is Guido not accepting "visual as part of the standard
> library". What old debate are you referring to? (Incidentally, Guido
> has always said nice things to me about visual.)

I'll try to look it up, but is was about float division.  It seems
trivial but I remember afterwards how a whole segment of the python
community seem to disappear.   That is, before the faction VPython and
Python were in the same group, but afterwards VPython receded from the
python-dev community.

> I agree that making visual a part of the standard library would make
> sense. But the problem I'm trying to address wouldn't have been helped
> by visual being in the standard library -- there would still be the
> serious Carbon/Cocoa problem to be solved.

Yes, but I think the way VPython attracts young programmers, that
there would be a whole support network.

> Incidentally, you might be mildly amused by the "fancy footwork" I
> alluded to. Briefly, when the user program invokes the visual module,
> I set up the interact loop (Cocoa on the Mac), then I import the
> user's program! This makes Cocoa the primary thread (and only thread),
> which is a requirement of Cocoa. This also means that any user
> statements preceding the visual import will be executed twice, which
> is unlikely to be a problem (and can be documented), and no statements
> in the visual module will be executed twice because once a module is
> imported in a session, executable statements are not re-executed by a
> later import in the same session.

Thanks, that is interesting.  I have been debating some of the
abstract parts of these issues in the thread on event loops and
asynchronous support in Python (happening recently in the python-ideas
list with Guido).  I think one of these has to be given up
[multi-platform, speed, abstracted (uniform) API] -- at least until
there's a unified pythonOS that is also a WebOS...

Mark