Fat and happy Pythonistas (was Re: Replacement for keyword'global' good idea? ...)

[Terry Reedy]

"John Roth" <newsgroups at jhrothjr.com> wrote in message 
news:11f9u843r0fts5b at news.supernews.com...
> Maybe "fat and happy" wasn't the best choice of words

Depends on the reaction you wanted ;-)

> However. I see nothing in the existing Python 3000 PEP that does
> anything other than inspire a yawn. Sure, it's a bunch of cleanup, and
> some of it is definitely needed. What I don't see is the inspired leap
> forward that will once again put Python in the forefront rather than
> simply being one choice among many.

My response is more than a yawn, but yes, the most exciting thing that I 
see is completion of the generator revolution started a few years ago.

> What I want to see in Python 3000 is an AST based language [much more 
> snipped]

I presume you mean AST as in human-comprehension oriented AST as in 
http://docs.python.org/lib/module-compiler.ast.html.

If I understand correctly, you are proposing that the essence of a Python 
program be its logical tree structure rather than its surface presentation. 
And this would be understood even if the developers also promoted a 
particular presentation as the 'preferred', 'official', or 'commonly 
shared' presentation.  And this might include a tree serialization format 
different from the presentation test format.

Yes, this is an interesting idea.  Perhaps, if you can flesh it out a bit 
and leave out stuff like 'fat and happy', you could write and submit a PEP.

Some of the developers are trying to finish the AST compiler before 2.5. 
If this means what I think it does, compiling ASTs direct to bytecode, it 
would be an essential component of your proposal and make it more possible. 
But I don't know much more about it.

I also know little about what intermediate forms PyPy used to compile 
Python code.

Terry J. Reedy