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How do you get a new application to stand between , like an I/O filter, the python prompt and the Python software? So that it would pass most stuff through to Python , unchanged , but some domain-specific paragraphs that the end-user types in , would be handled by a pre-parser, translated to python-legal syntax, and then given to Python? And output and error messages would be passed from Python to the user's prompt, like usual?

I'm a statistical programming language designer and my third project will be a data-cleaner, slanted to users who do not wish to be professional programmers. Python is great for some types of data preparation, but with a caveat: some types of data transformation benefit greatly from data-paragraphs, where each paragraph of code , pulls in some input datasets, does some querying/modifications, and puts the results in output datasets. ( examples of this are my first project , vilno data transformation ( http://code.google.com/p/vilno or http://fivetimesfaster.blogspot.com ) , the SAS datastep, and the SQL SELECT statement ).

So ... something that combines Python with a data paragraph, and has a really easy learning curve, would be incredibly useful.

Robert Wilkins

Robert
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I would recommend you look at this, this and if your DSL is going to really differ from Python, this and this.

Also, I would also recommend you look into Ruby as it is very easy to write domain specific languages in it. And, despite what a lot of people say, its not just for web development and ruby 1.9 speeds are comparable to python.

Then, of course, there's Lisp, but, I think I'm getting carried away :)

Community
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Dhaivat Pandya
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