[Python-Dev] Recent experience with the _ast module (original) (raw)

Collin Winter collinw at gmail.com
Tue Feb 13 01:27:06 CET 2007

I've been working this past week at converting the stdlib's compiler package to use 2.5's new _ast module instead of the package's own AST. Overall, _ast was a joy to work with, save for the following nitpicks:

  1. There are times when the _fields attribute on some AST nodes is None; if this was done to indicate that a given node has no AST-related attributes, it would be much easier if _fields was [] in this case. As it is, I had to special-case "node._fields is None" in the visitor so that I don't accidentally iterate over it.

  2. {BinOp,AugAssign,BoolOp,etc}.op is an instance of, eg, Add, Sub, Mult, Mod, meaning you have to dispatch based on tests like "isinstance(node.op, x)" or "type(node.op) is x". I would much, much prefer to spell this "node.op is x", ie, use "node.op = Add" rather than the current "node.op = Add()" when constructing the nodes.

  3. I'd like there to be an Else() node for If.orelse, While.orelse, etc. My motivation is that I need the lineno and col_offset values of the "else" statement for a code-coverage utility; as it is, I have to find the last lineno of the if/while/etc suite and the first lineno of the "else" suite and then search between those two for the "else" statement.

Thoughts?

Thanks, Collin Winter

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