On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 9:26 AM, Chris Seberino <cseber...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Friday, January 3, 2014 11:10:07 AM UTC-6, Devin Jeanpierre wrote: >> A lecturer of mine back in university did this (implemented a subset >> of Python in Racket). My understanding is that this is primarily >> interesting to show that Racket is not as crazily different as it >> looks from the syntax. > > Is that on the web anywhere? That would be very interesting to look at. I'm > sure others would find it useful too.
As far as I know, no. There was an early version of it that was part of a course, but as I understand it he did something much more thorough later on. Even that course content seems to be offline and not very available by archive.org; the relevant bits aren't archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20111119221012/http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~gfb/csc324/2010F/content.shtml Feel free to dig around and try to find something, but as I recall the assignment on that page was to write some very minor interpreter actions with a list generated from the AST of a python source file. His later work was translating Python to Racket, with macros to implement various Python operations. That wasn't an assignment or course content, it was stuff he'd show to students during office hours and such. I believe the end goal was to turn it into a real tool for teaching programming. The idea there was that Python is 90% irrelevant to teaching students how to program, and the full generality of Python makes it harder for students to learn due to weird behaviours or unreasonable complexity. If you decide to only implement the 10% of Python that you care to teach, then it's much easier to implement (in fact, without that, the goal isn't even achievable for one person), plus it serves your goals potentially better than Python does. Regardless of if it's a particularly good idea, this is what Python must look like if you try to elegantly directly translate it to Scheme (or any lisp), just because the semantics will be so different once you get out of the basics and the trivial things. If the translation is to be clean, the input language can't actually be Python. If the input language is Python, the output will be a horrible mess that isn't useful for the student, and also it will take a lot of work until it is even correct. Scheme is far simpler and smaller than Python is. -- Devin -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
