If only there was a language that let you modify the interpreter on the fly so you could do this as part of normal execution...
replies(4):
I would say it's a good thing, I don't want to see a hundred of half baked, badly tested and vaguely document DSL with no decent tooling support.
The reason we don't have such metaprogramming available everywhere is mostly because you have to subscribe to a particular ideology to allow it. If you think programmers are generally intelligent and responsible, you put macros and metaclasses in your language. If, on the other hand, you think most programmers are dumb code monkeys (with a few exceptions, maybe) your language becomes like early Java or early Go.
Since you mention it, Python does have a fairly elaborate metaclass system, but it seems like it's only really used for implementing the language and rarely if ever wielded by "users". I guess that's a reflection of the language ideology you're talking about.
Also for what it's worth, I know myself to be a dumb code monkey, but being in the CRUD gutter doesn't preclude me from looking at the metasyntactic stars.
Incidentally this turns out to be super hard to search for without asking an LLM, since "python coding" is so overloaded, and using the feature this way is intentionally undocumented because it's not really what it's for, and not something I think most python users really want to encourage. So, forbidden python knowledge!
Let's say you hate significative spaces, here is a (very fragile) PoC for your pain:
https://0bin.net/paste/42AQCTIC#dLEscW0rWQbE70cdnVCCiY72VuJw...
Import that into a *.pth file in your venv, and you can then do:
# coding: braces_indent
def main() {
print("Hello, World!")
if True {
print("This is indented using braces.")
}
}
Still, I'm very happy it stays limited to super specific niches. Big power, big responsibilities, and all that.
When this comes up I usually link to the work of Alan Kay and others (the very mystical sounding STEPS project at VPRI)
""" The big breakthrough is making it easy to create new DSLs for any situation. Every area of the OS has its own language (and you can just add more if you feel the need) so that the whole OS including networking and GUI is very compact, understandable, and hackable. This particular project focused on compactness, just to prove that it is quantitatively more expressive. """
comment by sp332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11687952
final report from 2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11686325