Pantry: A Macro Library for Python

Python lacks a simple way to create custom syntax and constructs that goes outside of its own syntax rules. A paradigm that allows for these possibilities to exist within languages is macros. Macros allow for a shorter set of syntax to expand into a longer set of instructions at compile-time. This gives the capability to evolve the language to fit personal needs. Pantry, implements a hygienic text-substitution macro system for Python. Pantry achieves this through the introduction of an additional preparsing step that utilizes parsing and lexing of the source code. Pantry proposes a way to simply declare a pattern to be recognized, articulate instructions that replace the pattern, and replace the pattern in the source code. This form of meta-programming allows its users to be able to more concisely write their Python code and present the language in a more natural and intuitive manner. We validate Pantry’s utility through use cases inspired by Python Enhancement Proposals (PEPs) and go through five of them. These are requests from the Python community for features to be implemented into Python. Pantry fulfills these desires through the composition of macros that that performs the new feature

Pytrec_eval: An Extremely Fast Python Interface to trec_eval

We introduce pytrec_eval, a Python interface to the tree_eval information retrieval evaluation toolkit. pytrec_eval exposes the reference implementations of trec_eval within Python as a native extension. We show that pytrec_eval is around one order of magnitude faster than invoking trec_eval as a sub process from within Python. Compared to a native Python implementation of NDCG, pytrec_eval is twice as fast for practically-sized rankings. Finally, we demonstrate its effectiveness in an application where pytrec_eval is combined with Pyndri and the OpenAI Gym where query expansion is learned using Q-learning.Comment: SIGIR '18. The 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research & Development in Information Retrieva

Python bindings for the open source electromagnetic simulator Meep

Meep is a broadly used open source package for finite-difference time-domain electromagnetic simulations. Python bindings for Meep make it easier to use for researchers and open promising opportunities for integration with other packages in the Python ecosystem. As this project shows, implementing Python-Meep offers benefits for specific disciplines and for the wider research community