[Python-ideas] Exposing regular expression bytecode

[Paul Moore]

On 16 February 2016 at 18:29, Jonathan Goble <jcgoble3 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> But if you are willing to dig into Python's C API yourself (and it
>> sounds like you are) there are definitely people who will help you.
>> You might want to join the core mentorship list (see
>> http://pythonmentors.com/) where you should get plenty of assistance.
>> This proposal sounds like a great "beginner" task, as well - so even
>> if you don't want to implement it yourself, still put it on the
>> tracker, and mark it as an "easy" change, and maybe some other
>> newcomer who wants a task to help them learn the C API will pick it
>> up.
>
> I'll look into the mentorship list; thanks for the link. As for
> marking it "easy", I don't seem to have the necessary permissions to
> change the Keywords field; perhaps you or someone else can set that
> flag for me? If so, I'd appreciate it. :-)

Done (although the "easy" keyword is mainly to help others know it's
something they could work on, so if you're working on it it's less
relevant :-))

> Also, I received a small patch off-list from Petr Viktorin
> implementing a getter for the code list (thanks, Petr). I'll need to
> test it, but from the little I know of the C API it looks like it will
> get me started in the right direction. Assuming that works, what's
> left is a public constructor for the regex type (to enable
> optimizers), a dis-like module, and docs and tests. I don't think this
> would be major enough to require a PEP, but of course being new here,
> I'm open to being told I'm wrong. :-)

IMO, this shouldn't need a PEP, unless someone feels that exposing the
code list implies a compatibility guarantee (personally, I don't - I
think that it should be seen in the same light as the dis module, and
as a CPython implementation detail).

Paul