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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Python recompile
Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2025 02:28:29 -0000 (UTC)
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On Wed, 5 Mar 2025 11:46:08 +0000, bart wrote:

> * Compile-time enumerations, and parallel tables of enums and data

Python doesn’t have enumerations as a language primitive; instead, they 
are implemented in a library module, written in pure Python -- it doesn’t 
do anything you can’t do in your own code. But it supports arbitrary 
attributes attached to enum instances, and subclassing of enums.

> * Jump-table-based 'switch' (this requires those named consts or enums)

Does it do switched expressions? You can do those in Python.

> * Built-in Support for C-style data types, including C-style structs and
> homogeneous array types
> * Built-in FFI for C-style APIs

Python provides this in the standard-library ctypes module. Remarkably 
useful for making a wrapper around a C library to make it look like the 
library was designed for use from Python. I have done a lot of wrappers 
like this.

> * Character constants: 'A' and 'ABCDEFGH' (Python needs 'ord("A")')

Python also has “\u” and “\U” for Unicode.

> * Static local variables within functions

Not really necessary, with classes.

Do you have lexical binding?

> * Built-in maths functions and constants like 'pi'

Complex arithmetic? <https://docs.python.org/3/library/cmath.html>

Hyperbolic functions? Gamma/log-gamma?
<https://docs.python.org/3/library/math.html>

There’s a reason why we don’t want to build all these into the core 
language, since there are so many of them that are needed nowadays.

> * Expression-based macros

Really only necessary if your language is not dynamic enough.

I notice no mention of coroutines or iterators. Those are quite useful 
nowadays.