[Python-ideas] Arbitrary constants in ASTs

[Victor Stinner]

2013/7/24 Haoyi Li <haoyi.sg at gmail.com>:
> How many other people in the world are doing AST manipulations to want this?

I wrote a project called astoptimizer which rewrites AST to implement
some static optimizations.
http://bitbucket.org/haypo/astoptimizer/

I need a get_constant() method checking if a node is "a constant". It
creates a tuple from a ast.Tuple tree for example. Having to
"encode/decode" (create tuple <=> create ast.Tuple) regulary is not
efficient. I would also like a first pass in the optimizer which would
replace ast.Num, ast.Str, ast.NameConstant, ast.Tuple, etc. to a
generic ast.Constant which contains directly the Python object.

See my get_constant() method:
https://bitbucket.org/haypo/astoptimizer/src/dfb2c702cb14785320ac34b868d5e1270f910825/astoptimizer/optimizer.py?at=default#cl-289

Victor