A newbie doubt on methods/functions calling

[Loren Wilton]

> [Cue the decades-old story about the elaborate set of C macros that I
> once saw somebody using so he could write a C program that looked like
> some flavor of structured BASIC.]

I once wrote a set pf C defines so that I could compile Pascal with a C 
compiler without having to change the Pascal source code.  Fortunately that 
was about 40 years ago, and I've long since lost the source for those 
macros.

The goal here isn't to make one thing look like another that it isn't.

The goal is to "write a Python environment for a mainframe", ideally without 
having to do all of the writing to do it from scratch.

Lots of people seem to have written Python interpeters in various languages. 
I guess I could sit down and write one in Algol or NEWP and have a native 
Python environment. But what good would it do me? This machine isn't 
something at a university where the first-year hackers write their 5-line 
programs with no IO.  Everything I read says the strength of Python is that 
there are many existing 3rd party libraries that do lots of useful things. 
Since a lot of them are distributed as binaries, they would not work in this 
mainframe environment.

So I don't want to WRITE a Python interpreter for the actual mainframe 
environment. I want to use an interpreter for an existing environment 
(Windows) where there are already a lot of existing libraries. But since a 
lot of the data to be analyzed is on the mainframe environment, and the 
results would be wanted there too, I need to extend the Python data access 
to the mainframe environment.

        Loren