[Python-Dev] A Hygienic Macro System in Python? (original) (raw)

Tom Emerson tree@basistech.com
Mon, 18 Mar 2002 17:27:41 -0500

Neil Schemenauer writes:

Alternately, we should be able to have different parsers that return a same type of AST. Next, we should able to optionally perform transforms on the AST before it is feed to the code generator. These transforms could be implemented in pure Python.

This would be very nice: when I was at Thinking Machines I worked on a High Performance Fortran (HPF) compiler that did this: we performed many parallelizing optimizations over the AST coming out of the HPF FE and generated code in Fortran 90 which was compiled by the platform's native F90 compiler (the idea here being that the vendor (SGI or Sun) would be able to write a better code generator for their CPUs than we could). Anyway, this resulted in a very configurable and highly maintainable optimizer that made it easy to try different optimizations during development).

-- Tom Emerson Basis Technology Corp. Sr. Computational Linguist http://www.basistech.com "Beware the lollipop of mediocrity: lick it once and you suck forever"