On Sat, 4 Mar 2000, Tim Peters wrote:
I like Moshe's suggestion fine, except with an abstract base class named Nanny with a virtual method named check_ast. Nannies should (of course) derive from that.
Why? The C++ you're programming damaged your common sense cycles?
Since parsing is expensive, we probably want to share the parse tree.
What parse tree? Python's parser module produces an AST not nearly "A enough" for reasonably productive nanny writing.
As a note, selfnanny uses the parser module AST.
GregS & BillT have improved on that, but it's not in the std distrib. Other "problems" include the lack of original source lines in the trees,
The parser module has source lines.
and lack of column-number info.
Yes, that sucks.
Note that by the time Python has produced a parse tree, all evidence of the very thing tabnanny is looking for has been removed. That's why she used the tokenize module to begin with.
Well, it's one of the few nannies which would be in that position.
God knows tokenize is too funky to use too when life gets harder (check out checkappend.py's tokeneater state machine for a preliminary taste of that).
Why doesn't checkappend.py uses the parser module?
Grabbing the GregS/BillT enhancement is probably the most practical thing we could build on right now
You got some pointers?
(but tabnanny will have to remain a special case).
tim-will-always-be-a-special-case-in-our-hearts-ly y'rs, Z. -- Moshe Zadka <mzadka@geocities.com>. http://www.oreilly.com/news/prescod_0300.html