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How old do you think Python is? :3 (Answer: 20 years old; it was first publicly talked about in 1991. Python is as old as Linux!)
by MostAwesomeDude 15y ago
How old do you think Python is? :3
(Answer: 20 years old; it was first publicly talked about in 1991. Python is as old as Linux!)
- ArbitraryLimits 15y agoHere's my favorite trivia story about how old Python is: You know JWZ's rant about how Java could have made integers first class objects by using the first bit as a flag for whether that machine word contained a primitive type or a pointer to an object, at the cost of only having a range of 2^31 instead of 2^32 (or whatever the word size was)? Python apparently had the same discussion in the early days, and made the same decision as Java (i.e. non-primitive integers, you have to box them to treat them as objects) and the reason was ... that the requisite bit twiddling was slow on DEC Alphas. (In fairness, at the time Guido was working for a government lab full of DEC Alphas.)