[Python-Dev] Re: Prothon on CPython intrepreter? [PROTHON]

[Mark Hahn]

On Tue, 10 Aug 2004 18:30:24 -0700, Brett C. wrote:

...<snip>...

Thanks for your words of support.

> I do have a piece of advice before you delve into this too deeply, and 
> that is to consider looking at the AST branch (tagged as ast-branch in 
> CVS).  Jeremy Hylton has been leading a rewrite of the compiler to take 
> the concrete syntax tree, generate an AST for it, and then emit opcode 
> from that.  It is *much* easier to use than how compile.c works now.  It 
> also, in my opinion, makes things clearer by breaking up compilation 
> into more, smaller steps.  It isn't in the main trunk yet, but it will 
> be someday (I personally plan to work on it once my thesis is done so 
> that I can hopefully integrate my work into the core more easily and it 
> is now tradition for some people to sprint on it at PyCON =) .
> 
> Who knows, you might be able to just generate your own version of the 
> AST or just have a different compiler for the AST itself and thus cut 
> down and code duplication.

I would like to use the AST since IronPython does.  This might make moving
from CPython to .Net easier later. Also Paul Prescod has been bugging me to
use the AST in general.   

I am planning on using stackless to get the lightweight threads so I don't
know how much trouble it will be to integrate all these versions.  Clearly
my codebase will be separate from everyone elses so I don't have to worry
about compatibility, but it would be nice to somehow make it easy to get
fixes from the Python codebase into mine easily.