On Sun, Jul 4, 2010 at 9:47 AM, Greg Kuperberg <[email protected]> wrote: > On Jul 3, 8:33 am, William Stein <[email protected]> wrote: >> Sage can't switch to Python 3 until every single Python package in >> Sage is ported to Python 3. >> This is far from done. It's possible that for some packages, nobody >> is even working on doing a port. In such cases, our only hope is to >> either do the port ourselves or remove the package from Sage, which >> may both be incredibly difficult. I've heard Twisted may be an >> example of such a package, but there might be others. Even numpy >> hasn't been ported to Python 3 yet, though at least there work is >> rumored to be in progress. > > Of course, you understand these issues better than I do. I didn't > even > consider that Sage has so many third-party libraries at the Python > level. > So yeah, I can see that it could take a long time to do such a > conversion. > > Even so, I would suggest a more developed policy than just that you > can't > do it right now. Certainly at first glance, Python 3 looks a really > good idea. Maybe at second glance, the conversion cost is very high > for > many projects and you could estimate that it will take many years for > the world to switch. (But note that the same was true of a really > great > editor called NEdit and Unicode, and the result in the long run was > that > it hurt NEdit a lot.)
What advantages do you see Sage getting from Python 3? I think the Sage library is probably in better shape than many of our dependancies (and the Cython files should just work), but it's hard to know 'till we get to it. > In any case the all-or-nothing answer cannot be completely true. > After all, > you have interface support for packages written entirely in C or > whatever > other language. So how could it be that if you were in Python 3, then > Python 2.* would be the one language that you can't support at all? > What would you do if you wanted to support a Python 3 package? We'd have to ship Python 3 as a distinct spkg, and probably call it via pexpect. - Robert -- To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support URL: http://www.sagemath.org
