[Python-Dev] Example for "property" violates "Python is not a one pass compiler"

[Greg Ewing]

Nick Coghlan wrote:

> It builds the symbol table before actually trying to compile anything. This is 
> what allows it to figure out which load commands to use for which symbols.

Yes, nowadays I expect it makes two passes over the parse
tree for each function, one to build the symbol table and
one to generate the bytecode.

It used to make a single pass over the parse tree and then
post-process the bytecode once it had figured out which
variables were local -- which I suppose you could call
one-and-a-bit passes. :-)

The distinction between one and two passes isn't so
important in a dynamic language like Python anyway, since
most of the interesting things happen at run time.

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+
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