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> So, you can do "something". You can only do "something" if that doesn't involve interpreting actual Python code. Which is a pretty big deal since we're talki

• crabbone 3y ago
  Modern Python programming is highly reliable on all sorts of tricks that don't involve interpreting Python code -- all sorts of strap-on JIT compilations, interpreting code in some other interpreter (not Python)... or just compiling Python ahead of time. Python library functions evolved from being simple and somewhat transparent into hugely complicated environments, possibly with their own interpreters that can be programmed by the same programmer who writes the Python program. While this is an unguided, hugely inefficient ad hoc process, it is this whole mess. Thus, people who write "Python programs" are actually writing programs in Python + a bunch of crappy unter-languages that operate at or even cross different layers of abstraction. And we still call this "mess" a Python program. Eg. Jinja templates or Nuitka decorators or IPython "magic" or Cython etc. So, in practical terms, there's a lot of what's going on in a Python program, because often a lot and sometimes most of it isn't written in Python proper, Python is just a kind of entry point to that mess, and is used as a label for a thing that nobody cared to give a proper name.