I was very disappointed that this is “interpreting” some tiny made up language. This is not Python, or even within three orders of magnitude of Python.
It’s true, the title should have said “Python-like”
Making a Python interpreter in 1024 bytes
11–20 of 120 posts
Re: Making a Python interpreter in 1024 bytes
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
And, there are multiple white space symbols! is different than So you also have to track the actual sequence of counts of white space used for each level, rather than just a simple count.
Or you just forbid mixing spaces and tabs in the same indentation sequence, the way most whitespace-sensitive languages seem to end up doing. Or you make a slightly more reasonable rule: spaces may follow tabs, but no tabs may follow a space. That's at least unambiguous.
But it also feels arbitrary and annoyingly restrictive. On top of that there are at least 25 whitespace codepoints in UTF. Should your language really be opinionated about when, where, and in what order (for example) the "mongolian vowel separator" appears?
Re: Making a Python interpreter in 1024 bytes
#13A lot of criticism of python often mentions the whitespace as lexical scope tokens, and that criticism is usually posited by users of the language. As implementer of an interpreter, did you feel that whitespace for lexical scoping made the job of writing the lexer significantly more complex?
And, there are multiple white space symbols! is different than So you also have to track the actual sequence of counts of white space used for each level, rather than just a simple count.
It's just a stack containing strings at the end of the day. Really not a big deal.
Re: Making a Python interpreter in 1024 bytes
#14A lot of criticism of python often mentions the whitespace as lexical scope tokens, and that criticism is usually posited by users of the language. As implementer of an interpreter, did you feel that whitespace for lexical scoping made the job of writing the lexer significantly more complex?
> that criticism is usually posited by users of the language.
Uhhh, no. Sure, it's posited by people who feel they are are forced to use it, but it's basically unlearning other syntax.
Here's a study about people with no experience. They do better with python:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262256894_An_Empiri...
When the scala language made whitespace optional, it was very divisive, but now it's extremely well accepted.
Re: Making a Python interpreter in 1024 bytes
#15A lot of criticism of python often mentions the whitespace as lexical scope tokens, and that criticism is usually posited by users of the language. As implementer of an interpreter, did you feel that whitespace for lexical scoping made the job of writing the lexer significantly more complex?
And, there are multiple white space symbols! is different than So you also have to track the actual sequence of counts of white space used for each level, rather than just a simple count.
For a 1024 byte implementation (and even way more complex impl.) You would just force one whitespace char, and definitely no mixing.
Re: Making a Python interpreter in 1024 bytes
#16Re: Making a Python interpreter in 1024 bytes
#17This is really cool! It's so fun to see what you can achieve and what's optional. I have seen the 'single character variable' limitation in some other minilangs before, but using the source itself as the target of function calls and loops is new to me. It does make a lot of sense but I wouldn't have thought of that.
Re: Making a Python interpreter in 1024 bytes
#18A lot of criticism of python often mentions the whitespace as lexical scope tokens, and that criticism is usually posited by users of the language. As implementer of an interpreter, did you feel that whitespace for lexical scoping made the job of writing the lexer significantly more complex?
> that criticism is usually posited by users of the language. Uhhh, no. Sure, it's posited by people who feel they are are forced to use it, but it's basically unlearning other syntax. Here's a study about people with no experience. They do better with python: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262256894_An_Empiri... When the scala language made whitespace optional, it was very divisive, but now it's extremely…
I meant users of languages ( application programmers) as opposed to compiler programmers, not python programmers specifically, so I'm including devs that use other languages and see in python a tool that they would consume.
Re: Making a Python interpreter in 1024 bytes
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
And, there are multiple white space symbols! is different than So you also have to track the actual sequence of counts of white space used for each level, rather than just a simple count.
It's just a stack containing strings at the end of the day. Really not a big deal.
Right, pointers to strings but yeah. Essentially the whitespace count specifies the stack depth at which a line is to be executed. A decrease in stack depth means all superior levels are terminated.
Doesn't affect function call stacks though.
Re: Making a Python interpreter in 1024 bytes
#20For those who actually need something like this in production, there is Snek: https://sneklang.org/ > “ Snek is a tiny embeddable language targeting processors with only a few kB of flash and ram. ”
Yes, but compiling or modifying Snek from source is very challenging. I wish it was one single C file for an example base like Posix, instead of many files for many platforms plus a custom parser in Python (Lola).