[Python-Dev] Policy for making changes to the AST

[Guido van Rossum]

On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 10:05 AM, fwierzbicki at gmail.com
<fwierzbicki at gmail.com> wrote:
> As a re-implementor of ast.py that tries to be node for node
> compatible, I'm fine with #1 but would really like to have tests that
> will fail in test_ast.py to alert me!

[and]

On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 10:38 AM, Michael Foord
<fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk> wrote:
> A lot of tools that work with Python source code use ast - so even though
> other implementations may not use the same ast "under the hood" they will
> probably at least *want* to provide a compatible implementation. IronPython
> is in that boat too (although I don't know if we *have* a compatible
> implementation yet - we certainly feel like we *should* have one).

Ok, so it sounds like ast is *not* limited to CPython? That makes it
harder to justify changing it just so as to ease the compilation
process in CPython (as opposed to add new language features).

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)