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RFC -- HYGIENIC MACROS IN PYTHON

Courageous jkraska at san.rr.com
Tue Feb 5 21:41:14 EST 2002 
>> At the moment, no. I have my own lexer, parser, validator
>> and emitter. The first two are fairly close to done, missing
>> a few notables, like comprehensions. The last are very much
>> a work in progress. Lotto work there; still in design on those.
>
>Is this written in Python?

No. They are written in C++. It _interprets_ (well, right now,
just parses) Python. It's pretty fun learning the Python team's
own lessons the hard way. I bump into these problems and then
say to myself, "God, this is really hard, how the Devil did the
Python guys get past this," only to discover they didn't and now
I've learned why. Most educational.

Let's just say that a language which uses implicit indent and
dedent as a grammatical delimiter is limited in the ways it can
be practically instantiated in the real world by virtue of the
constraints themselves. Given the nature of that particular
set of constraints, it turns out that Python is a very good
realization of the solution -- something very similar to what
I'd call a "natural mapping".

If I were to do my own indent-generated scoped language, I
can't say that it would really _look_ all that different from
Python.

C//
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