Plurrrr

I never got used to bash scripting syntax. Whenever I have to write a more-than-trivial bash script, the strange syntax annoys me, and I have to Google every little thing I need to do, starting from how to do comparisons in if statements, how to use sed , etc.

For me, using Python as a shell scripting language seems like a better choice.

Python is a more expressive language. It is relatively concise. It has a massive built-in library that let you perform many tasks without even using shell commands, it is cross-platform and it is preinstalled or easily installed in many OS’s.

I am aware that some other dynamic languages (e.g Perl, Lua) might also be very suitable for shell programming, but I (and my team) work with Python daily and familiar with it, and it gets the jobe done.

We started this series with an overview of the CPython VM. We learned that to run a Python program, CPython first compiles it to bytecode, and we studied how the compiler works in part two. Last time we stepped through the CPython source code starting with the main() function until we reached the evaluation loop, a place where Python bytecode gets executed. The main reason why we spent time studying these things was to prepare for the discussion that we start today. The goal of this discussion is to understand how CPython does what we tell it to do, that is, how it executes the bytecode to which the code we write compiles.