was: Re: looking for MOP documentation

[Holger Krekel]

Hello Peter,

Peter Hansen wrote:
> Michael Hudson wrote:
> > Of course, there's a sense in which Common Lisp just doesn't have much
> > syntax, but Python's hardly overloaded with it, either.  *The objects*
> > or to be more precise the *types* of objects themselves are what
> > determine really happens, and that's precisely the sort of thing
> > metaclasses let you play with.
> 
> I guess this might get down to the question of whether Python is more about
> the syntax, grammar, keywords, and such, of the language or more about the 
> standard types of objects which are provided with it.  In my mind, it's 
> very much the former and very little the latter, but maybe that's just me.
> Dicts and lists and integers are interesting and all, but I'm not sure 
> it's their behaviour which makes Python Python.

Although probably 2/3 of the implementation of Python deal with the type/object
implementations, from a using-the-language point of view the syntax probably
contributes more obviously to the observed "simplicity" of Python.   

But the term "meta object protocol" seems to point much more into
the direction of types/objects as Michael suggests and here Python
has a lot to offer. Is there some free material on MOP somewhere? 

FWIW, in the next pypy-sprint we'll probably try to deconstruct the python-syntax
and its resulting compilation and execution into several aspects.  Maybe
we should term this effort meta language protocol :-)

cheers,

    holger