[Axiom-developer] python vs lisp

[daly]

Python has one major flaw, suffered by all of the lisp-with-parens
languages. Lisp can read, manipulate, and write lisp programs as
data structures in a trivial, natural way. No parser is required.
The program-data equivalence is a non-trivial difference.

This is widely used within Axiom and in a fundamental way.
This would require major design rewrites to accomplish in Python.
Given that they are turing equivalent it is not a theoretical problem.

But Axiom rewrites expressions, rewrites them again, turns them into
functions, unparses them, reads and writes them to files, and generally 
slices and dices the code in many structural ways. You COULD do this 
in Python but you'd get a factor of 10 expansion because you'd
need parsers and compilers for the various intermediate mini-languages.

Tim