[pypy-dev] specfic questions for getting into the code for first time

[Hunter Peress]

I ran pypy -S the first time two days ago. before, i had been lurking on the mailing lists and irc
channel.

I was met with extreme apathy and active negativity and downright avoidance yesterday in the irc.

It should be evident that I am a kind and extroverted person that wants to help the project. over
4 hours of repeating questions on irc, i was able to glean just a little bit of information.

Here are my questions:


Specific example:
could someone kindly explain how you can tell that test_stringobject.py uses more appspace tests 
than test_intobject.py. ok test_int doesnt seem to use w() anywhere, could that be a correct
correlation (hpk originally told me that some low hanging fruit could be picked off by converting
test_intobject.py to use more appspace tests)

Code symbology:
Types are implemented by the following convention: W_TypeObject eg (W_SliceObject) but whats all
the w_   ....._w stuff like w_globals or self.failUnless_w(space.lt(w('a'), w('b')))  

...eg what is the distinction between upper and lower W ? maybe w means coming from the appspace ?
whereas W means only in objspace ? and _w means going into appspace ?

im also curious about how w()  and space.wrap() differ?

Tying it all together:
it would also help me (and thereby anyone else thats new) if a full working function could be
commented on, this is why i made the : http://codespeak.net/moin/pypy/moin.cgi/WalkThroughFunction
page. 


Goals:
I immediately dived into PyPy -S and found that int->Long promotion wasnt working, that there is
not yet a longobject.py implementation and that Longs dont even seem to work that well. all from:

fact = lambda n:[1,0][n>0] or fact(n-1)*n

then i tried fact(100) fact(1L) and fact(1)

i want to work on these issues so that i can know how to swim around the source code, and then
move on.

I am a very good abstract thinker as well as being technically competent, i hope to help pypy
because it is insanely interesting to me.

gooday. 

-Hunter


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