Sun Microsystems Inc’s Java may be making all the headlines, but there are other languages out there in the public domain that can do similar things. One of them is Python, an object-oriented interpreted language that was developed in 1989 by Guido von Rossum at CWI, the Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica, in Amsterdam. Von Rossum later moved on to the Corporation for the National Research Initiatives, CNRI, in Reston, Virginia, where development continues. The first release was in 1991, and the latest version, 1.3, is due this month. Python is largely a new implementation of well tried ideas: modules and exceptions from Modula-3; syntactic features and high-level data-types from the teaching language ABC; extensibility and dynamic typing a la Lisp; and object-oriented programming and interpretation a la everyone. It is a general-purpose programming language on scripting steroids. Standardisation is controlled by the author, along with the Python Software Activity, a set of informal working groups sponsored mainly by CNRI. Its big advantage over Java is that it is free: full source and binaries are downloadable for various Unix systems, Mac, OS/2, MS-DOS, Windows, Amoeba and others. There are no licence fees and the few restrictions relate to copyright. The numerous associated tools include development environments, graphical user interface kits, a few database interfaces, several language-specific interfaces (for example to Microsoft’s Foundation Classes for C++) and some useful Internet utilities. Python’s profile was raised recently by the decision of DataViews Corp to use it as its end-user programming tool, integrated in with its C++ framework. The Web’s Infoseek International search system is written in Python, but Visix Software Inc, Reston, Virginia, r ejected it in favour of the Java-based scripting language to develop its next generation of tools. It did consider using the Python language but opted for Java for pervasiveness reasons. The first product to use this new technology is codenamed Galaxy Interactive, an object repository designed for object and design storage and re-use. Its scheduled to ship in the first quarter 1996.
