Problem: Python PMC's just don't work in the leo-cxt5 branch which will become head/trunk at some time in the hopefully not to distant future.
What I've done up time now: I've ported pyint.pmc, pystring.pmc to pass all tests in leo-cxt5 I've written t/dynclasses/pystring.t Note that there are something like 15-20 python.pmc's or which only 4 have corresponding test in I've written t/dynclasses/ I've ripped out a lot of the explicit passing of self as the first argument of pmc methods. - We don't have to pass self around, parrot makes it available to us automatically. Sam's implementation of Python PMC is old and outdated. He did a lot of pioneering work in the realm of the python object system on parrot. Probably the first real attempt at a full object system on top of parrot. Parrot has changed drastically since then. Sam's PMC's were also incomplete, they lacked support for a lot of the __add__ style python methods. This is quite understandable, Sam was trying to get something working. Proposal: I propose to gut all of PyObject, PyFunc, PyClass, PyType PMC's etc. Old New PyObject PyObject - will represent a instantiation of a python class, will inherit from ParrotObject PyClass PyClass - will represent a python class, will inherit from ParrotClass PyType PyMetaClass - will represent the meta-class of a class, this one is still open for debate. I plan on making these changes via test driven development. The plan is to reduce python object system pmc's code content and functionality to zero, and then rebuild it up Mainly because every time I try to morph Sam's code, Leo tells me the whole approach is wrong :) We will rebuild the python object system based on test cases, If functionality is missing, and you want it implemented, write and submit a test case first. One last design note. I had a conversation a long time ago with Dan, in which he agreed that given Python's property bag style object system. That class methods and data members should be stored in parrot properties and the vtable getattribute/setattribute methods for python pmcs should be overridden to use parrot properties instead parrot attributes. Sam's PMC appeared to follow the same idea though not fully flushed out, and I plan on building the new Python PMC in the same manner. Comments welcome. Kevin Tew
