This is Python, language installation and program structure

Installing Python is easy. If you use Windows, you have no choice at all - run setup.exe and you are done. Under Unix, Python can be preinstalled or you can install it manually. I always prefer to install from source on a clean machine, but if you have it preinstalled, you should be fine too.

Python installation is fully self-contained, and can be migrated to a different machine by copying all the files (or just the necessary ones) from c:\pythonXX or /usr/local/whatever/ to the destination. Multiple versions of Python coexist peacefully in different directories (although you should copy them around manually, because installation process registers stuff in the Windows registry and do other such things of global effect).

Python installation essentially contains the language parser+compiler and a huge and poorly structured standard library. The compiler itself along with a minimum set of libraries lives in pythonXX.dll or pythonXX.so.1, and the executable python.exe or bin/python is nothing but a simplest driver program of the (read line, execute, repeat) sort. The standard library lives in c:\pythonXX\lib + DLLs or /usr/local/lib/pythonXX/ and is just a heap of assorted utilities.

Python can be and is easily embedded into another application. It is a DLL, remember ? You take the DLL, zip the standard library and there you have it in two files - an embedded Python. In your application you create an instance of a compiler at runtime and start feeding it with stuff, that's all. Python can also be embedded into a diskless machine, it works just fine in a very restricted environment (such as the high security FreeBSD CD that I have here).

Python program consists of a set of separate modules, each module is a separate .py file containing some source code. The program is therefore available to the language in source, but Python nevertheless is not an interpreter. As each module is about to be used at runtime, it is loaded, parsed and compiled to an intermediate byte code for some virtual machine. The compiled byte code is saved alongside the original source file in an identically named .pyc file for future reuse. The outcome is the same as with Java or C# or any other language that translates source into byte code, and the difference is that in Python there is no separate compilation stage as such - the translation is performed at runtime and is in fact an important part of program execution.

To be continued...