Python Community Server: Development

2002-7-5

Extending language syntax

A few months back I started trying to design a programming language. Then I discovered Python, and realised it was far more useful than anything I was likley to come up with. Then I discovered C#, which does a lot of things better than Python, but at the same time sacrifices a lot of the things that make Python so fun to program with.

It would be an interesting task to write a preprocessor to 'extend' the C# language to let you do stuff like list comprehensions, or quick declaration of dictionaries and arrays.

Wouldn't it be cool if you could say something like:

Hashtable Foo = { "one": 1, "two": "two", "three": 3.0, "now": dateTime.Now };

... or ...

ArrayList bar = [ 1, 2, 3 ];

... or ...

ArrayList baz = [ d.Year foreach DateTime d in listOfDates ];

These would generate something like:

Hashtable foo = new Hashtable();

foo[ "one" ] = one;

foo[ "two" ] = two;

foo[ threeKey ] = three;

foo[ "now" ] = DateTime.Now;

... and ...

ArrayList bar = new ArrayList();

bar.Add( 1 );

bar.Add( 2 );

bar.Add( 3 );

... and ...

ArrayList baz = new ArrayList();

foreach( DateTime d in listOfDates )

{

baz.Add( d.Year );

}

That would probably halve the amount of code that I write in C#, bringing the overhead down to the level of Python. It will seriously kill IntelliSense though, and IntelliSense is the main reason I like C#. Hmm. Is it possible to extend the IDE to know about things like this?

In related news, my C# data object wrapper generator is working (generating lots of C# code which compiles and seems to go fine) and just needs the addition of a few 'isDirty' flags so Commit() knows what to send back to the database. I'll release the source in a few days, probably.

It's making my database code look much cleaner. I now only need to specify my DB structure once (in XML), run MakeWrappers.py, and suddenly I've got all my database fields from my queries into tblFoo available as properties of a FooRow object.

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