Show HN: Adding some syntactic sugar to Python

https://github.com/czheo/syntax_sugar_python

by czheo • 10 years ago

77 21 10 years ago

This is a cool demonstration of how make some fundamental changes to Python by using operator overloading, but it feels fragile and very different from Python. At the end of the day, I'd think that if you want to program like this, you want a different language.

czheo3• 10 years ago

Yes, it's very anti-pythonic. I collected some ideas and created this lib just as an experimental toy to demonstrate some possibility.

greglindahl5• 10 years ago

Leaves me wondering if I'd be shooting off my little toe or my whole foot!

Might be fun to show pythonic equivalents for the ones that are relatively easy to make pythonic. You might discover some useful pythonic functions along the way.

waleedka• 10 years ago

The nice thing about Python is that it's intuitive and feels natural. To that end, this syntax for defining functions is nice, and I would love to see it implemented in native Python:

    f(x) = x^2 + 1

But most of the other ideas are less intuitive than their native counterparts. For example, I think that the native form:

    3 in [1,2,3,4,5]

is clearer than:

    [1,2,3,4,5] /contains/ 3

greglindahl5• 10 years ago

Related to your first idea, Fortran had statement functions, and it didn't go very well in the end.

neuland3• 10 years ago

What went wrong with them in Fortran?

msravi• 10 years ago

Julia has this kind of syntax (among others) for functions.

gigatexal• 10 years ago

I like the threading / processes abstractions. I'll be watching this over time. Kudos.

czheo3• 10 years ago

I feel so honored that this project was tweeted by Matz himself. https://twitter.com/yukihiro_matz/status/823386626424328192

yomly• 10 years ago

whoa - good job!

exDM69• 10 years ago

The naming is odd, because the syntax hasn't changed, only the semantics of some operators have changed.

An example of syntactic sugar is list comprehensions. It's a new syntax for expressions using map, filter, etc. It's "new" syntax for something that can be described in terms of the "old" syntax without altering the semantics.

Given the name, I was expecting some kind of macro system or hacks to the Python parser.

czheo3• 10 years ago

Yes, I agree with you. Strictly speaking, I was creating new semantics of the operators which looks like "new" syntax, to mimic "syntactic sugar". But I have no idea how to name this in a more understandable way.

gregn610• 10 years ago

Sounds kinda like Pyp http://opensource.imageworks.com/?p=pyp which I've been meaning to get more into, to replace shell foo.

kbd• 10 years ago

That was always an interesting project. Too bad it's not maintained.

dfox• 10 years ago

On a similar note I wrote this over few days last week: https://github.com/adh/py-clos

What it severely lacks is readme that clearly states what it does with some realistic examples and is understandable by people who have no idea what CLOS is, so: It allows you to do function overloading which is resolved dynamically based on actual types of passed values or even values themselves. With the included (trivial) C extension it's only about 50% slower than Python method call, so in all for expected usecase it's faster than Visitor pattern not to mention more DRY.

teilo• 9 years ago

It's like the ugly baby of Python and OCaml

Show HN: Adding some syntactic sugar to Python

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