Home Original page

Python, Perl Rewrites: Alliance?

David Abrahams abrahams at mediaone.net
Mon Jul 31 05:02:38 EDT 2000 
<joneshenry at my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:8m38ca$an5$1 at nnrp1.deja.com...
> My first question would be whether CNRI also claims in effect
> the trademark for the Python language as well as the copyright
> for the current source code.  Would someone be able to write
> a Python compatible language from scratch and still call it Python
> without CNRI's permission?

As a "standards geek", I should probably point out that there's a bigger
obstacle to writing a Python-compatible language, at least if you care about
compatibility of existing extension modules: for all intents and purposes,
the documentation of the "C" API is in the source code. Yes, there are
various documents floating around which purport to document the "C" API, but
I've always found that serious work requires reading the source. I suppose
it's possible that most extensions only rely on the documented subset of the
available API, but I'm guessing that's not the case.

-Dave
More information about the Python-list mailing list