Project: cons

An implementation of Lisp/Scheme-like cons in Python.

Project Details

Latest version
0.4.6
Home Page
https://github.com/pythological/python-cons
PyPI Page
https://pypi.org/project/cons/

Project Popularity

PageRank
0.002452885239715333
Number of downloads
124470

Build Status Coverage Status PyPI

Python cons

An implementation of cons in Python.

Usage and Design

The cons package attempts to emulate the semantics of Lisp/Scheme's cons as closely as possible while incorporating all the built-in Python sequence types:

>>> from cons import cons, car, cdr
>>> cons(1, [])
[1]

>>> cons(1, ())
(1,)

>>> cons(1, [2, 3])
[1, 2, 3]

In general, cons is designed to work with collections.abc.Sequence types.

According to the cons package, None corresponds to the empty built-in list, as nil does in some Lisps:

>>> cons(1, None)
[1]

The cons package follows Scheme-like semantics for empty sequences:

>>> car([])
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ConsError: Not a cons pair

>>> cdr([])
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ConsError: Not a cons pair

By default, str types are not considered cons-pairs, although they are sequences:

>>> cons("a", "string")
ConsPair('a' 'a string')

This setting can be overridden and other types can be similarly excluded from consideration by registering classes with the abc-based classes MaybeCons and NonCons.

Features

  • Built-in support for the standard Python ordered sequence types: i.e. list, tuple, Iterator, OrderedDict.
>>> from collections import OrderedDict
>>> cons(('a', 1), OrderedDict())
OrderedDict([('a', 1)])

  • Existing cons behavior can be changed and support for new collections can be added through the generic functions cons.core._car and cons.core._cdr.
  • Built-in support for unification.
>>> from unification import unify, reify, var
>>> unify([1, 2], cons(var('car'), var('cdr')), {})
{~car: 1, ~cdr: [2]}

>>> reify(cons(1, var('cdr')), {var('cdr'): [2, 3]})
[1, 2, 3]

>>> reify(cons(1, var('cdr')), {var('cdr'): None})
[1]

Installation

pip install cons

Development

First obtain the project source:

git clone git@github.com:pythological/python-cons.git

Create a virtual environment and install the development dependencies:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Set up pre-commit hooks:

$ pre-commit install --install-hooks