[Python-Dev] IronPython and AST branch

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Sun Sep 17 11:40:41 CEST 2006


Brett Cannon wrote:
> As for making the AST branch itself more of a standard, I have talked to 
> Jeremy Hylton about that and he didn't like the idea, at least for now.  
> The reasons for keeping it as "experimental" in terms of exposure at the 
> Python level is that we do not want to lock ourselves down to some AST 
> spec that we end up changing in the future.  It's the same reasoning 
> behind not officially documenting the marshal format; we want the 
> flexibility.
> 
> How best to resolve all of this, I don't know.  I completely understand 
> not wanting to lock ourselves down to an AST too soon.  Might need to 
> wait a little while after the AST has been out in the wild to see what 
> the user response is and then make a decision.

One of the biggest issues I have with the current AST is that I don't believe 
it really gets the "slice" and "extended slice" terminology correct (it uses 
'extended slice' to refer to multi-dimensional indexing, but the normal 
meaning of that phrase is to refer to the use of a step argument for a slice [1])

Cheers,
Nick.

[1]
http://www.python.org/doc/2.3.5/whatsnew/section-slices.html

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
---------------------------------------------------------------
             http://www.boredomandlaziness.org


More information about the Python-Dev mailing list