Brief_introduction

Three steps to start CPython:

  1. Initialization: data structure, memory.
  2. Compiling: parse tree, ast, symbol tables, code object.
  3. Interpreting: execution of the generated code objects

Project directory overview

_images/overview.png
  • Doc: The manual
  • Grammar: Where Grammer is defined
  • Include: The C headers
  • Lib: Python portion of the python library
  • Modules: C portion of the python library
  • Objects: The builtin object(string, list, bool, tuple)
  • Parser: Grammer, lexer, parser, compiler
  • Programs: The executable python program
  • Python: The virtual machine

Python includes a compiler, interpreter. However, the compilation doesn’t do much work. After compilation, the source code would turn into the bytecode, which is the code object.

Code object Compiled by CPython compiler can not be directly executed by the computer, it needs to be executed by the virtual machine, which is, interpreter.

Also, the virtual machine is running on a stack, and each frame has its own data stack. If not, we don’t have the generator feature.

The reason that Python is called a dynamic language is that many things are done when the program is running, such as type checking.

def add(a, b):
    return a+b
add(1,2)
add("hello","world")

>>> 3
>>> helloworld