Playing with Python abstract syntax trees.

20 Sep 2017

The code bellow is an hello world using python abstract syntax tree. The code is built by hand craftng an AST, compiling and executing. If you’re going to build something that compiles to python you’ll hit this at some point. Also is very cool for learning how the interpreter parses the code.

import ast

expr = ast.Call(ast.Name('print', ast.Load()), [ast.Str('Hello World')], [])
stmt = ast.Expr(expr)
mo = ast.Module([stmt])
ast.fix_missing_locations(mo)
exec(compile(mo, filename='<ast>', mode='exec'))

Cheers,