Making a Python interpreter in 1024 bytes

(austinhenley.com)

37 points | by azhenley 59 minutes ago

6 comments

  • tempodox 5 minutes ago
    This seems to be in the same spirit as Justine Tunney's SectorLISP. Very cool.

    https://justine.lol/sectorlisp/

  • teddyh 30 minutes ago
    For those who actually need something like this in production, there is Snek: <https://sneklang.org/> “Snek is a tiny embeddable language targeting processors with only a few kB of flash and ram.
  • hankbond 29 minutes ago
    Good use of free will and well-written. Very nice walkthrough austin!
  • TZubiri 52 minutes ago
    A lot of criticism of python often mentions the whitespace as lexical scope tokens, and that criticism is usually posited by users of the language.

    As implementer of an interpreter, did you feel that whitespace for lexical scoping made the job of writing the lexer significantly more complex?

    • nomel 41 minutes ago
      And, there are multiple white space symbols!

      <space><space><tab><space>

      is different than

      <space><tab><space><space>

      So you also have to track the actual sequence of counts of white space used for each level, rather than just a simple count.

      • rmunn 30 minutes ago
        Or you just forbid mixing spaces and tabs in the same indentation sequence, the way most whitespace-sensitive languages seem to end up doing. Or you make a slightly more reasonable rule: spaces may follow tabs, but no tabs may follow a space. That's at least unambiguous.
        • fc417fc802 0 minutes ago
          But it also feels arbitrary and annoyingly restrictive. On top of that there are at least 25 whitespace codepoints in UTF. Should your language really be opinionated about when, where, and in what order (for example) the "mongolian vowel separator" appears?
      • jubilanti 18 minutes ago
        > <space><space><tab><space> is different than <space><tab><space><space>

        in my view, both are the same, both `is` (or ===) an IndentationError raise

  • ni5arga 41 minutes ago
    the blog post is pretty well-written! loved how he wrote about the the code-golfing part.
  • Scubabear68 29 minutes ago
    I was very disappointed that this is “interpreting” some tiny made up language.

    This is not Python, or even within three orders of magnitude of Python.

    • SPBS 1 minute ago
      It’s true, the title should have said “Python-like”