3 ms·

I've been toying with the idea of implementing some sort of DSL on top of python but wouldn't really know where to start. Would you have any pointers (heh) giv

• ssize_t 7y ago
  I think the `#coding:` approach is promising. You have to fit your parsing/transpilation into a pretty small time budget (which is a fun challenge on its own) to keep the startup time hit negligible. The source code gets reparsed serval times in certain cases, e.g. when printing a stack trace, so its a good idea to have some sort of caching mechanism. As far as parsing goes, if you want to stick with python I've had good success with pyparsing [1], otherwise I have a strong preference to do language-related things in OCaml with menhir [2]. I've toyed with wrapping the Python parser in an OCaml library with decent success [3]. But, of course, unless you're optimizing for fun, it's probably a good idea to stick with Python. Another, weirder, approach is creating a language that happens to be able to be parsed by the same grammar as python, then using a decorator (or similar) to get the source code or the ast to reparse and transpile. As an example you could have something like `a <- b` be the syntax for an actor model message receive dsl (which is valid python). [1] https://github.com/pyparsing/pyparsing https://github.com/pyparsing/pyparsing [2] http://gallium.inria.fr/~fpottier/menhir/ http://gallium.inria.fr/~fpottier/menhir/ [3] https://github.com/georgek42/pyparser https://github.com/georgek42/pyparser
  • lapnitnelav 7y ago
    Thanks a mil for the tips.
• j88439h84 7y ago
  Syntactic is a module specifically for doing this. https://github.com/metatooling/syntactic https://github.com/metatooling/syntactic