Comments on: Python internals: Working with Python ASTs

By: Lora Ireland

Lora Ireland — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 23:29:47 +0000

This is great! Thanks for this post. I am starting python and this is a big help.

By: E.T

E.T — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 04:41:33 +0000

One of the fascinating features that Lisp has is the ability to do meta-programming (macro), and I think that with ast module, Python (partially) obtains this ability in a somehow weird way.

By: eliben

eliben — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 05:24:42 +0000

Jose,

I wouldn’t say Python is currently moving towards Lisp. On the contrary – there was a great debate for the Python 3000 move about the functional tools – map, reduce, lambda. Guido wanted them removed from the language (because list and generator comprehensions are better), but at last was convinced to keep them – though I think reduce moved from a built-in to a module (functools) in the standard library.

By: José Hernández

José Hernández — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 19:27:58 +0000

This is interesting because it seems Python is moving more and more towards Lisp, albeit with a significantly different syntax. It adopted functional programming built-in functions (map, reduce, filter). Lisp programs have the unique ability to analyze and modify other Lisp programs. AST is a significant step towards bringing this ability to Python.

By: alexmajy

alexmajy — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 19:16:59 +0000

I like it and “Abstract vs. Concrete Syntax Trees”, thank you

By: Christopher Lozinski

Christopher Lozinski — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 16:16:15 +0000

Thank you very much. I have long wondered why we are typing text to generate code. With this stuff, I can build an editor that only allows legal statements. That goes a long way to getting rid of lots of errors.

I did not quite understand all the details, but the fact that the compiler can take AST graphs is all i need to know at this point.

Thank You
Christopher Lozinski