Hacks

My PythonUK 2004 slides (source)

As I'm still a student (and a maths student, at that), I don't do all that much "serious" programming, but I do futz around with Python quite a bit.

The scariest hack I ever have perpetrated is undoubtedly the bytecodehacks. The docs used to live on starship, but they've moved to sourceforge. Development of the bytecodehacks has largely halted -- they were never much more than a crazy idea. If someone wants to update them to Python 2.2 or newer, I'll give my support.

I recently decided that the bytecodehacks weren't scary enough, and wrote PPY, a package that lets you write Python callables in PPC assembler.

Sometime around the time of Python 2.0's release, I wrote a little piece about the new setdefault method on dictionaries, but forgot to link to it from these pages...

I have written a particularly despicable piece of code that uses bytecodehacks and metaclasses to remove the need for the "self" parameter that periodically gets complained about on c.l.py.

I have also written two versions of a simple non-deterministic evaluator using (the old version of) Christian Tismer's stackless python. There's an incredibly short version and a somewhat more readable version. Take your pick; both are almost certainly too slow to be actually useful.

pyrepl is my readline-alike in Python. It's not finished (and might well never be), but I like it.

I've written a guide on How To Think Like A Pythonista which attempts to explain how Python works, and emphasizes Names, Bindings and Objects.

Last updated: $at some point -- I don't use CVS anymore... $. Comments to mwh@python.net.
Best viewed with any browser. Except netscape 4 with javascript on...