[Python-Dev] Policy for making changes to the AST

[Floris Bruynooghe]

On 4 April 2011 19:07, Glyph Lefkowitz <glyph at twistedmatrix.com> wrote:
>
> On Apr 4, 2011, at 2:00 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 10:05 AM, fwierzbicki at gmail.com
>> <fwierzbicki at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> As a re-implementor of ast.py that tries to be node for node
>>> compatible, I'm fine with #1 but would really like to have tests that
>>> will fail in test_ast.py to alert me!
>>
>> [and]
>>
>> On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 10:38 AM, Michael Foord
>> <fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk> wrote:
>>> A lot of tools that work with Python source code use ast - so even though
>>> other implementations may not use the same ast "under the hood" they will
>>> probably at least *want* to provide a compatible implementation. IronPython
>>> is in that boat too (although I don't know if we *have* a compatible
>>> implementation yet - we certainly feel like we *should* have one).
>>
>> Ok, so it sounds like ast is *not* limited to CPython?
>
> Oh, definitely not.  I would be pretty dismayed if tools like <http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~divmod-dev/divmod.org/trunk/files/head:/Pyflakes/> would not run on Jython & PyPy.

Add py.test as an application that uses the AST to support Jython,
PyPy and CPython in a portable way.  I always assumed AST was created
*because* bytecode was too CPython specific (but then I've never
implemented a language).

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