[sugar] Education?

[Guido van Rossum]

On 3/11/07, Andrew Clunis <orospakr at linux.ca> wrote:
> Antoine van Gelder wrote:
> > Don Hopkins wrote:
> >> Of course it might just be more powerful and efficient to re-implement
> >> something like Klik-and-Play from scratch in Python, as a plug-in
> >> visual scripting component, which can be used to script a
> >> HyperCard-like gui environment, and games built on top of it like
> >> SimCity and Robot Odyssey.
> >
> > Anyone know the current status of being able to turn an AST tree emitted
> > by the Python compiler module back into code after it has been modified ?
>
> I've been looking into this for Develop activity, but it seems that path
> has never been explored.  Best approach seems to be to write a
> pretty-printer to walk the tree.

I'm curious about the focus on ASTs that seems apparent in this
subthread (though I may easily be misreading between the lines :-).
I've always been more inclined to edit the text and re-parse from
there, as it puts the author in control of formatting, comments etc.,
and this is how most "real-world" environments work. (Not that that
necessarily makes it better, but neither is the opposite true.) Is
someone willing to write up a brief comparison between the two
approaches?

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)