Renaming identifiers & debugging

[Luca]

Chris Rebert wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 7:26 AM, Luca <lucat at despammed.com> wrote:
>> Hello, i am trying to develop an application to teach programming to young
>> kids in a similar way as Logo did in the past. I would like to use an
>> embedded Python as underlying language but this raises a problem.
>>
>> The target of my app are very young kids that might be unfamiliar with
>> english, so i am wondering if there is a way to rename/redefine identifiers
>> and messages in the language of the kid.
>>
>> In UCB-Logo this is very easy with the command
>>  COPYDEF "newidentifier "oldidentifier
>> so all you have to do is setup a startup script to redefine all the
>> identifiers to the language of the user.
>>
>> Is there anything similar for python? Since python would be embedded it
>> would not be a problem for me to do it through some API.
> 
> It can certainly be done (c.f. ChinesePython -
> http://www.chinesepython.org/cgi_bin/cgb.cgi/english/english.html),
> but I know of no framework that simplifies the task. Essentially, you
> just have to manually modify Python's parser by swapping out the
> english for the other language (and if you want to mess with the basic
> types' names, their name definitions somewhere else too). There also
> might be encoding issues to deal with.
> 
> Cheers,
> Chris
> --
> http://blog.rebertia.com

Yes, i am playing with Python source code, i have changed some keywords 
but the compile-process fails when it tries to compile some of python 
libraries which, of course, use english keywords... so i guess this is 
not a very clean/viable solution (without having to rewrite several 
parts of the libraries). A better solution could be to "duplicate" 
keywords adding a translated version but leaving the original version in 
place so that every module keeps working. In few words, if i was going 
to translate the keyword "if" in, say, italian "se", then i would have 
both "if" and also "se" working at the same time, in the same manner.
I think that the best way to do this is to insert a "filter" somewhere 
that converts every "se" keyword into a "if" keyword so that python 
doesn't even see the change.

What i would like to do is add a new keyword (lets call it "copydef" 
like in UCBLogo or whatever) that does this work at runtime by keeping a 
substitution table in RAM. If i could manage to add this new keyword to 
python then it would be easy to write a startup script that translates 
the keywords once python is "up and running" and without breaking 
existing python programs/libraries (unless the new keyword conflicts 
with functions defined inside these programs/libraries).

Thanx,
   Luca