[Python-ideas] .pyu nicode syntax symbols (was Re: Empty set, Empty dict)

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 04:48:14PM -0700, Andrew Barnert wrote:
> First, two quick side notes:
> 
> It might be nice if the compiler were as easy to hook as the importer. Alternatively, it might be nice if there were a way to do "inline bytecode assembly" in CPython, similar to the way you do inline assembly in many C compilers, so the answer to random's question is just "asm [('BUILD_SET', 0)]" or something similar. Either of those would make this problem trivial.
> 
> I doubt either of those would be useful often enough that anyone wants to put in the work. But then I doubt the empty-set literal would be either, so anyone who seriously wants to work on this might want to work on the inline assembly and/or hookable compiler first.

Again, to be absolutely clear here, I hate this idea. `set()` is
perfectly clear. Sorry. Had to be said before any of this.


Right, so, this was brought up before, but with Hylang
(https://github.com/hylang/hy), we abuse the PEP 302 new import hooks to
search sys.path for .hy files rather then .py files.

You could do the same for your .pyu files (again, *without* the blessing
of the core team, as this is insane), and do the mangling before passing
it to the normal internals to turn it into bytecode / AST.

Doing it this way means you won't have to futz with the compiler,
and you can remain happy.

And we like being happy.


More info:

  https://github.com/hylang/hy/blob/master/hy/importer.py
  http://slides.pault.ag/hy.html#/15
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmMaN1AokTI
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulekCWvDFVI
  http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0302/


Again, this approach can be a bit flaky, and this particular issue might
very well cause problems for us as a community - seeing as how the
syntax is almost exactly identical.

Hylang (for what it's worth) is just a nice way for us Lisp nerds to stop
complaining as much.


Godspeed,
  Paul

-- 
#define sizeof(x) rand()
</paul>
:wq
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