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Comment by debatem1 | Hacker News Reader

Last I heard Codon was a python-like language rather than actual Python and the author suggests something similar. Headline seems pretty misleading.

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It was only technically python-like, but enough like it that you could conceivably call them the same thing.

Codon can't even run the whole python standard library. It changes integer semantic from arbitrary width to fixed width. Exaloop's own docs refer to the process of converting code between the two as "porting".

Seems like if it isn't pythonic enough to run python code correctly it probably shouldn't be called "python".

If it accepts a subset of python it's technically python: any codon-python program is a python program. Not full python but python nonetheless...

My understanding:

The goal is not to compile existing python code but to write new python code meant to be compiled in order to be faster. Limited use, still useful.

It is trivially easy to write a codon program which runs in both Codon and Python but behaves differently in a way that is not considered a bug in either language. That means it is not a subset, unless by that you mean that each language has a subset of the other's programs which it can run. In which case C and JavaScript are the same language too.

Is there an example of this? I know there's several areas where Cpython has some funky undefined behavior, but those aren't particularly notable because they're by definition implemention dependent.

Isn't fixed width integers as compared to arbitrary width an example of this?

The 2**64 example given here is exactly right. You don't need undefined behavior or language lawyering to hit the difference; you just need a 65 element bitset.

print(repr(2**64))

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