it seems like a few weeks ago... but actually it was more like 30 years ago that i was programming in C, and

[Greg Ewing]

On 23/02/23 9:37 am, Hen Hanna wrote:
>                  for the first  several weeks... whenever i used Python...  all i could think of....was   --------  this is really Lisp (inside) with  a thin veil of   Java/Pascal syntax..........
> 
>                 -----  that  everything is  first converted  (macro-expanded)  into (intermediated) Lisp code, and then.........

I once toyed with the idea of implementing a Python compiler
by translating it into Scheme and then feeding it to a Scheme
compiler.

But I quickly realised that, although Scheme and Python are
both dynamically-typed languages, Python is way *more* dynamic
than Scheme.

So without doing some very serious static analysis, the best
I could do would be just putting together calls to runtime
support routines that implement all the dynamic dispatching
that Python does for its operators, etc., and the result
wouldn't be much better than an interpreter.

There are some similarities between Python and Lisp-family
languages, but really Python is its own thing.

-- 
Greg