[ Thanks to Frank for
this link. ]
“What most programmers probably think of when they talk about
“Python” is the specific implementation sometimes called “CPython”
(because it is implemented in C). However, Python as a language
specification has been implemented several times in parallel with
the evolution of Guido van Rossum’s reference implementation. This
article consists of annotated interviews with the creators of two
of the non-standard Pythons — Stackless and Vyper.”
“By my count, there are four implementations of Python that
you can download and run today, and one more implementation is
being created. Each implementation has interesting reasons for
existing, which you can read about here in the words of the
implementation developers themselves.”
“Recompiling a compiler or interpreter to a different platform
produces an implementation that is only trivially different (there
might be minor conditional compilations and changes), but the most
interesting implementations (to me) are those that transcend
platform issues. In fact, the Python implementations we’ll look at
in this article are mostly multiplatform themselves. The idea of an
implementation is also different from that of a version. All the
implementations treated here are basically at the same language
version (1.5.2) in terms of the language features. Obviously
CPython 1.6/2.0/3000 already has a partially new underlying
implementation, but the other implementations can equally match the
features at these language levels.”