第49页 | Learning Python | 阅读 ‧ 电子书库

It’s Portable

The standard implementation of Python is written in portable ANSI C, and it compiles and runs on virtually every major platform currently in use. For example, Python programs run today on everything from PDAs to supercomputers. As a partial list, Python is available on:

 

Linux and Unix systemsMicrosoft Windows and DOS (all modern flavors)Mac OS (both OS X and Classic)BeOS, OS/2, VMS, and QNXReal-time systems such as VxWorksCray supercomputers and IBM mainframesPDAs running Palm OS, PocketPC, and LinuxCell phones running Symbian OS and Windows MobileGaming consoles and iPodsAnd more

Like the language interpreter itself, the standard library modules that ship with Python are implemented to be as portable across platform boundaries as possible. Further, Python programs are automatically compiled to portable byte code, which runs the same on any platform with a compatible version of Python installed (more on this in the next chapter).

What that means is that Python programs using the core language and standard libraries run the same on Linux, Windows, and most other systems with a Python interpreter. Most Python ports also contain platform-specific extensions (e.g., COM support on Windows), but the core Python language and libraries work the same everywhere. As mentioned earlier, Python also includes an interface to the Tk GUI toolkit called tkinter (Tkinter in 2.6), which allows Python programs to implement full-featured graphical user interfaces that run on all major GUI platforms without program changes.