Talk:PyoLogo
Revision as of 20:20, 11 January 2007 by Ian Bicking (talk | contribs)
Some questions:
- Are the threads native threads, or cooperative/green threads? Native threads give you access to traditional C APIs (though often not widgets), green threads make high numbers of turtles possible.
- Could make be a special form, to allow make :counter :counter + 1 ? This seems to be what children initially guess anyway, even if the strict/normalized interpretation seems simpler.
- Are there first-class objects? The one example I see uses named turtles. I really like first-class objects (not purely named objects, which always felt like a limitation of the interpreter, not the language).
- Have you looked at the OO as implemented in PyLogo? It's not really complete, but it maps very closely to Python's notion of objects. There's a description here.
- I'd strongly recommend a test strategy early on, especially for the core language (the graphics are harder to test). PyLogo includes a doctest subclass that runs Python-style doctests but using the Logo interpreter. You might be able to adapt that to the Pyologo interpreter.
- How is the interpreter constructed? I'm curious how it compared to PyLogo, of course. PyLogo lacks UI, but the interpreter is in reasonable shape. (I have played around a little with using PLY here -- but I didn't get very far on that before my attention was taken away.) It doesn't allow for green threads, which is a problem. One of the things I was thinking about in a rewrite is mapping Logo source directly to Python objects with small changes, like subclassing list to keep track of original source location for tracebacks.
- You might want to look at Genshi, a templating language in Python. It compiles the templating language to the Python AST. The implementation is surprisingly simple. The module that does this is genshi.template.eval.
-- Ian Bicking 19:20, 11 January 2007 (EST)
