[Python-Dev] C AST to Python discussion

[Jeremy Hylton]

On 2/16/06, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> Whereas if there weren't any funky coding style in the
> first place, more potential compiler hackers might be
> encouraged to have a go.

I'm trying to make the code simple.  The style of code is different
than other parts of Python, but a compiler is different than a
bytecode engine or implementations of basic types.  Different problem
domains lead to different program structure.

> Also I'm still wondering why we're going to all this effort
> to build a whole new AST and compiler structure if the
> purpose isn't to *avoid* all this transformation between
> different representations.

The goal is to get the right representation for the problem.  It was
harder to understand and modify the compiler when it worked on the
concrete parse trees.  The compiler now has a couple of abstractions
that are well suited to particular phases of compilation.

Jeremy