Testing complex new syntax

[astromog at gmail.com]

Carl Friedrich Bolz wrote:
> I cannot really say much about how easy it would be to just write a
> preprocessor. However, I think what you are trying to do could be done
> reasonably easy with the PyPy project:
>
> http://codespeak.net/pypy
>
> PyPy is an implementation of a Python interpreter written in Python.
> (Disclaimer: I am a PyPy developer). It has a quite flexible
> parser/bytecode compiler that could probably be tweaked to support your
> new syntax (especially if the new constructs can be mapped to standard
> python).

It looks like the lack of thread support means I can't just use PyPy by
itself, unfortunately. But the tokeniser, lexer, parser and AST builder
could do what I need with modification, then I could walk the generated
AST and produce standard Python code from that. How easy would it be to
separate these parts out from the rest of PyPy?