other python ideas

[Patrick Wray]

"Alex Martelli" <aleaxit at yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:9at9lt11iet at news1.newsguy.com...

> Scheme, with comparable flexibility (and only a tad more complication),
> has some compilers which generate _splendid_ code -- yet, alas, it
> seems to be used mostly in teaching and researching CS; nor does
> CLisp (vastly more complicated, but _rich_ with _excellent_
> compilers) appear to be anywhere near the road to world dom.  So,
> it's still to be seen whether what you call 'excess flexibility' is indeed
> at all significant as a factor keeping the code-generation unoptimized
> in Python, AND pretty doubtful that code-generation improvements
> would be significant to Python's success as a language.

As for popularity, I agree - but it would be nice to work wholly within
Python, rather than dropping back to C or C++ for algorithms that can't
afford the runtime cost of an interpreter.

This is probably not a new suggestion, but has anyone looked into the
possibility of implementing core Python in Common Lisp? At a glance, it
would seem to be the shortest route to an interpreted AND compiled Python,
in a fully interactive environment. Interactive development is even better
in Lisp - eg, being able to modify and compile individual functions while a
program is running is a real luxury - especially for server side
development.

I'm not sure what we'd do with all the other Python goodies though: GUI
toolkits, C extension modules, etc.

If this has been discussed before, could someone point me to a mailing list
archive, or any other source? I'd be interested to hear of any efforts
(successful or otherwise) in this direction.