[Python-Dev] AST branch is in?

[Neal Norwitz]

On 10/20/05, Anthony Baxter <anthony at interlink.com.au> wrote:
>
> Could someone involved give a short email laying out what concrete (no
> pun intended) advantages this new compiler gives us? Does it just
> allow us to do new and interesting manipulations of the code during
> compilation? Cleaner, easier to maintain, or the like?

The Grammar is (was at one point at least) shared between Jython and
would allow more tools to be able to share infrastructure.  The idea
is to eventually be able to have [JP]ython output the same AST to
tools.  There is quite a bit of generated code based on the Grammar. 
So some stuff should be easier.  Other stuff is just moved.  You still
need to convert from the AST to the byte code.

Hopefully it will be easier to do various sorts of optimization and
general manipulation of an AST rather than what existed before.

Only time will tell if we can acheive many of the benefits, so it
would be good if people could review the code and see if things look
more complex/complicated and suggest improvements.  I'm not all that
familiar with the structure, I'm more of a hopeful consumer of it.

HTH,
n