Is a "real" C-Python possible?

[J. Clifford Dyer]

On Wed, Dec 12, 2007 at 06:36:49AM -0800, sturlamolden wrote regarding Re: Is a "real" C-Python possible?:
> 
> On 12 Des, 12:56, George Sakkis <george.sak... at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Ah, the 'make' statement.. I liked (and still do) that PEP, I think it
> > would have an impact comparable to the decorator syntax sugar, if not
> > more.
> 
> I think it is one step closer to Lisp. I believe that it would be
> worth considering adding defmacro statement. Any syntax, including if,
> else, for, while, class, lambda, try, except, etc.  would be
> implemented with defmacros. We would only need a minimalistic syntax,
> that would bootstrap a full Python syntax on startup. And as for
> speed, we all know how Lisp compares to Python.
> 

Programmable syntax is a very powerful concept.  However, python is designed not only to be powerful, but simple, and this change would drastically reduce the simplicity of Python.  It would cease to be a good beginner's language.  If you want a language with different syntax than python, python has wonderful parsing libraries.  Use those instead.

My 2Â.

Cheers,
Cliff