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

[fwierzbicki at gmail.com]

On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 6:37 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 1. Making "docstring" an attribute of the Function node rather than
> leaving it embedded as the first statement in the suite (this avoids
> issues where AST-based constant folding could potentially corrupt the
> docstring)
> 2. Collapsing Num, Str, Bytes, Ellipsis into a single Literal node
> type (the handling of those nodes is the same in a lot of cases)
> 3. Since they're keywords now, pick up True, False, None at the
> parsing stage and turn them into instances of the Literal node type,
> allowing the current Name-based special casing to be removed.
All of these sound like useful changes to me - I wouldn't want them
blocked on Jython's account. We'll just implement them when we catch
up to this version as far as I'm concerned.

-Frank