Replacing `import` with `accio`: A Dive into Bootstrapping and Python's Grammar
Summary of Blog Post (I'm not the author):
At Hacker School, I've been building an alternate universe Python by overwriting builtin functions and statements with Harry Potter spells. This is a thing you can do at Hacker School!
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TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 28 comments
I'm not a python programmer. But shouldn't this be possible at runtime by modifying the AST to change it back to import in the AST? That way you could have a module you can just include to run this without a custom interpreter.
Edit: Looks like this is doable by messing with the tokenizer: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/214881/can-you-add-new-statements-to-pythons-syntax
You could create a loader.py where you tokenize the script yourself, and replace accio with a custom import that again loadds imports by tokenizing them yourself first. And then after you've modified the tokens you should be able to build a valid AST and run it :)
I'm pretty sure you can just throw a SyntaxError there yourself too if you encounter a real "import".
Nice hack nevertheless.
Awesome hack!
Did you consider import hooks to accomplish this? Of course that wouldn't make your bootstrap language any different; that'd still be vanilla python. In the imported file you can do whatever you want, for example the inimitable paultag implemented hy, a python lisp, using those.
its probably easier to add custom syntax to python by using custom encodings. The dropbox pyxl library does this. Details: https://github.com/dropbox/pyxl#implementation-details
I was expecting the magic to be changing
``` import math x = math.ceil(y)
``` into
``` x = accio ceil(y)
``` and having it Just Magically Work (tm).
But it's a nice write up of recompiling Python with a changed grammar.
this is such a great assignment for a principles of programming languages class. there is no better way to learn something than to break it up, change it and make it do your wish. i'm going to be teaching my next batch of muggles this.