Category Archives: Python

Universal Set in Python

Posted on 16. April 2009 by kay

Building sets from set() and ANY When defining a regular expression there is a well known duality between a set of characters specified by enclosing characters or character ranges within square brackets `[…]` and defining the pattern of the complement … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics, Python | Tagged | 9 Comments

The statement that never was

Posted on 15. April 2009 by kay

The Python release archive is a nice repository for archaeological findings. My biggest surprise was the existence of an access statement and `access` keyword in the pre-history of Python 1.5.0. The syntax was already specified in release 1.0 with an … Continue reading →

Posted in General, Python | Tagged | 1 Comment

Pyload part I ( Path objects )

Posted on 7. April 2009 by kay

This article is the first in a series that studies the design of a module import system. Although this work is situated in the Python context it can stay on its own to a large extent and ideas may be … Continue reading →

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Broken beyond repair – Pythons import system

Posted on 3. April 2009 by kay

It often happens that language features we have once distasted become comfortable after a while. We learn to live with them, take their advantages and forget about their annoyance. For many Python developers things like the explicit `self` in the … Continue reading →

Posted in Python | 9 Comments

Contextual Keywords

Posted on 22. March 2009 by kay

Keywords and Contextual Keywords A language keyword is a reserved word that cannot be used as an identifier for variables, constants, classes etc. Often it is an element of language syntax. Syntactical structure is simplified by means of keywords. A … Continue reading →

Posted in csharp, EasyExtend, Grammars, Python | Leave a comment

CPython vs IronPython

Posted on 10. March 2009 by kay

Two video shots tell more than 2000 words. CPython Get the latest Flash Player to see this player. [Javascript required to view Flash movie, please turn it on and refresh this page] IronPython Get the latest Flash Player to see … Continue reading →

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The thunk_stmt and programmable semantics In Python

Posted on 9. March 2009 by kay

Seems as if there was just a single direction of syntactical improvement of Python these days which is the introduction of Ruby style blocks. Tav suggests to reuse Pythons with-statement: with_stmt: "with" expression (["as" target] | ["do" [parameter_list]]) ":" suitewith_stmt: … Continue reading →

Posted in DSL, Grammars, Python | 4 Comments

Lonely Python is Intelligent Design and how to liberate from it

Posted on 7. March 2009 by kay

Python is doomed. Well, of course it is not yet doomed. Python is an evolutionary dead end living lonely on its own fitness plateau. It is clear that Python won’t have offspring because of significant whitespace aka indentation sensitivity. No … Continue reading →

Posted in DSL, Grammars, Python | 2 Comments