Re: [Visualpython-users] Philosophical question

[Dethe E. <de...@an...>]

> There
> are a couple of features in Visual that were just very slow in the
pure-Python
> version.

But I'm not asking about the pure-Python version, I'm asking about Python +
pyOpenGL
+ Numeric.  What I wanted to know is how much of what VPython does goes
beyond
what pyOpenGL and Numeric have already ported to C?  And the answer seems to
be,
quite a bit: maintaining double-precision floating point and error checking
especially.

> That said, I don't see
>
> a) why Python should be more portable than C. Python is written in C.
Beyond
> that, PyOpenGL relies on a working OpenGL implementation. Which is exactly
what
> Visual needs (well, C++ really). I have yet to hear of the platform that
had a
> working Python interpreter before it had a working C compiler.

It's one more thing to port.  Each takes time and is dependent on the time
available to
the developers.  The closer to being pure python the easier to port,
assuming that python
and the libraries will have to be ported anyway/already.  I have yet to hear
of a platform
that had a working VPython implementation before it had a working Python
implementation :-)

> b) why it should matter "as a pedagogical tool" how Visual is implemented.
If
> the internals were one extremely long PERL line, it shouldn't matter. The
main
> thing is the friendly Python API.

VPython is very nice and simple to use, but it is still easy to want to do
things which
go beyond it.  I'd like to have some good examples of OpenGL programming in
Python,
but this isn't one of them.  Not a criticism of VPython, just a
disappointment on my
part--got to keep looking or roll my own.

--Dethe