[Python-ideas] Optimizing builtins

[Guido van Rossum]

On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 4:43 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 7:51 AM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
>> and of course for more fun you can make it more dynamic (think
>> obfuscated code contests).
>
> Not to mention the champions of obfuscation for CPython: doing the
> same things from an extension module, or by using ctypes to invoke the
> C API (although such mechanisms are obviously outside the language
> definition itself, they're still technically legal for non-portable
> CPython code)

Hm. I wouldn't even call such things "legal" -- rather accidents of
the implementation. If someone depended on such an effect, and we
changed things to make that no longer work, good luck arguing that we
violated a compatibility promise.

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