SnoPy – Snobol Pattern Matching Extension for Python | Hacker News Reader

SnoPy – Snobol Pattern Matching Extension for Python

snopy.sourceforge.net

63 pointscurtis10 comments

Needs uploading to pypi, lots of devs brought into python via django etc 'pip install' basically everything.

+1 I've been doing python for 10 years. I pip install everything. If it's not on pypi it doesn't exist.

And possibly move from sourceforge

It depends upon both SWIG and Gnat (an Ada implementation, apparently), so even if it were pip installable, you'd need to install those two non-python dependencies via another mechanism.

Plenty of PyPI packages have external dependencies (e.g., anything that uses Cython will require a C compiler). SWIG isn't needed, since it is a source generator, and it's trivial to ship the generated source as part of the release process. GNAT is not commonly installed, but since it's part of GCC, it's packaged for every major OS and distribution. So there's one external dependency that is trivially installed, and many packages have similar requirements.

That's fine. I only use things I can install using on a virtualenv using pip.

For personal projects I'll use workarounds to make things not on pypi work, but don't trust it enough to for work projects.

Take a look at http://sourceforge.net/projects/snopy/. The project hasn't been updated for 3 years, and the files haven't been updated since 2002. I'm not sure that the dev is particularly active any more.

I've been contacting a lot of older Python graphics projects recently and you would be surprised how many people will do updates (particularly when you supply a patch).

This isn't something I need right now, so you t won't be me this time.

There was a SPITBOL/SNOBOL thread recently. I thought: no need to use the language as we could probably do it in Python, LISP, or something similarly flexible. Just steal the good parts of the past language while having all the good parts of the current one. And BOOM. :)

Skimming this the impression I get is that you could reduce the dependencies and rewrite it on top of a more modern parser approach such as a PEG [Parsing Expression Grammar] or parser-combinator and in fact the SNOBOL pattern matching here is very PEG-like and you could get away with just renaming/aliasing some of the basic PEG combinators to do this pattern matching and learning the PEG library of choice's conventions and likely get the bonus of IDE autocomplete/intellisense.

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