On 2010-10-27 09:41-0600 Orion Poplawski wrote: > Has any thought been given to supporting python3? Fedora now ships python3 > alongside python and numpy now has a python3 module.
Hi Orion: Your question inspired me to google for python2 versus python3 differences, and I found http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/python3-in-python2.html. That essay notes the lack of backwards compatibility and resulting all-or-nothing transition demanded by python3. The conclusion is that python3 uptake has been slowed because of this problem. I also compared http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=python3-defaults and http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=python-defaults. According to those statistics python3 has about 1 per cent of the python2 usage for Debian users. My guess is that the popularity of python3 over python2 will take a long time to be established and may never be complete. On the other hand, python3 usage is definitely here now and growing, and it solves some fundamental issues with the python2 language. Thus, it would be a shame if python3 users were forced to go without PLplot for too much longer. My conclusion is we should support both python2 and python3 similarly to the way we support both Fortran 77 and 95. Implementing that should be straightforward. According to http://ctrl-c.us/blog/archives/99, swig-1.3.37 or later (Debian testing already has swig-1.3.40) supports python3 so we could do a lot of the work by copying bindings/python to bindings/python3 and examples/python to examples/python3 while applying the 2to3 script where appropriate to convert our python2 scripts to python3 syntax. Of course, "the devil is in the details" so there would presumably be a lot of such details to sort out before we really had working python3 bindings and examples. There are quite a few other projects that are on my PLplot agenda at the moment, and I also need to spend some substantial time with the FreeEOS project in the near future. So I estimate it would be a long time (probably from 6 months to a year) before I could tackle the above myself. Thus, I hope somebody else here (whether you are a core PLplot developer or just getting started with PLplot development) jumps in before me if you have an interest in python3. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Nokia and AT&T present the 2010 Calling All Innovators-North America contest Create new apps & games for the Nokia N8 for consumers in U.S. and Canada $10 million total in prizes - $4M cash, 500 devices, nearly $6M in marketing Develop with Nokia Qt SDK, Web Runtime, or Java and Publish to Ovi Store http://p.sf.net/sfu/nokia-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
