PyCon Pittsburgh. April 15-23, 2020.

Talk: The soul of the beast: Everything about Python's grammar

Presented by:

Pablo Galindo Salgado

Description

We will try to answer a straightforward question: What makes Python so easy to learn and read? Other languages also have a robust community and a compelling ecosystem and standard library, but Python somehow stands out on how easy it is to understand existing code and how quickly and pleasantly people can learn it. In this talk, we learn everything about the Python Grammar: how the Python parser is automatically generated and how it works, how the technical details of the grammar translate into the properties of the language we all know and love, what are the limitations that prevent some grammar rules you would think are trivial from being implement, and finally, how to include new grammar rules in CPython in the form of a new operator with an associated protocol.