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I was confused by this naming scheme and I am an (allegedly) seasoned software engineer of the DOS era (team 6.11a).

Reading these comments about why it's named python.COM, yes that's pretty clever but it didn't even occur to me when I first read the post and I suspect the majority of people on hackernews had the same impression.

Go is definitely also bad naming, but the domain is golang.org and the canonical search term for the Go programming language is "golang".

In this day and age, we should probably be optimizing for clarity and searchability instead of "clever use of an outdated tech naming" which half of the engineers nowadays wouldn't even know about.



Oh, this is just my guess why it's named .COM: I have no idea if any of it is true, and I am in no way related to the project!

I am not disagreeing on the clarity and naming, but in this case, I don't think it's a big deal at all.


It's named .com because it's a flat executable format. If you map it into memory and start executing at the first byte (MZ which means JG +69) then it'll just work.


Thanks for confirming my guess! Nice work on getting the conpatibility layers for sys interfaces done as well!




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