Python vs. Lisp -- please explain

[Carl Friedrich Bolz]

Paul Rubin wrote:
> "Kay Schluehr" <kay.schluehr at gmx.net> writes:
> 
>>I talked to Richard Emslie recently and he told me that the PyPy team
>>works on a mechanism to create CPython-extension modules written in
>>RPython i.e. a statically translateable subset of Python. So even
>>without dynamic code specialization there will be an optimization path
>>based on the PyPy toolchain that is amazing. 

Well. "... the PyPy team works on ..." is definitively much too strong. 
It is more like "... the PyPy team is thinking about ...". It is very 
unclear whether it will work on a technical level and whether the EU 
will allow us to allocate resources accordingly.

> Sounds great but is that a whole lot different from pyrex?

Indeed, there are similarities to pyrex. Of course in pyrex you have to 
give the types yourself, but since the type inference engine of PyPy can 
sometimes be hard to understand this is maybe not the worst trade-off. A 
nice advantage of the PyPy approach would be that you can test your 
RPython code by running it on top of CPython until it works and only 
then translating it into C. Plus it would be possible to use the same 
extension module for PyPy, CPython and potentially even Stackless or 
Jython (if somebody writes a Java backend).

But as I said, this is all pretty unclear at the moment (and getting 
really quite off-topic for this thread).

Cheers,

Carl Friedrich