[Chicago] Python Source?

[Chris McAvoy]

Hi Skip,

On 3/7/07, skip at pobox.com <skip at pobox.com> wrote:
>
>     Chris> As an idea for a future meeting, is anyone on list familiar with
>     Chris> the Python source enough to give a tour?  Nothing huge, but I'm
>     Chris> sort of interested in it.  Not that I think I'll do anything with
>     Chris> it, but just as a "let's all get a little more familiar with the
>     Chris> source."
>
> I used to be, back in the day.  I suppose how well I could lead a discussion
> depends on how much detail you want.  Can you pose some questions you think
> might be reasonable to answer with such a tour?

I've been thinking about your question...I don't have a good answer.
However, I do have the following loose ramblings.

I just opened up the code in a text editor, and thought "it would be
cool to get a guided tour of this code."  I don't have a language
design background, so from that very naive text-opening, I'm just sort
of interested in how Python "works."  Stuff like, which data
structures are written in C, which are in pure Python...how does the
parser work?  It might also be a good chance to work in the goals of
PyPy.

At Pycon, I attended a few of the Stackless talks, and realized I
really didn't fully understand why stackless was significant or
different from the standard C Python (apart from the speed
improvements and nice fun looking threading improvements.)

What I'm asking is kind of a big question, and sort of really deserves
a several semester computer science program to answer.  It's me, using
ChiPy as my own personal un-university.  If you're up for this vague
challenge, I'm totally interested in listening.

Chris