TL;DR for those that may have been scared off by the length of my previous
email:
I propose a method of improving ob-python.el by using a progn-like eval()
Python function which can wrap and execute source blocks.

If this list is not appropriate for discussion of improvements to
ob-python.el, could you please give me pointers how to reach people that
might be interested in helping and discussing?

Kind regards,
Ondřej Grover

On Sat, Dec 5, 2015 at 6:17 PM, Ondřej Grover <ondrej.grover@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I've been playing around with the Org-mode Babel framework and I am
> grateful to all the contributors for making this wonderful library. After
> some time I noticed that Python support seems a little hacky and
> inconsistent and after reading through ob-python.el and consulting Python
> documentation I came up with a proposal for improving it.
>
> The ob-ipython project tries to solve this hackiness in a different way by
> using the client-server infrastructure of IPython/Jupyter. That works quite
> well too, but my hope is that improving ob-python.el would also make it
> simpler to use IPython as the python REPL, relying only on the core of the
> Python language.
>
> It essentially boils down to implementing progn-like eval() function in
> Python which would return the result of the last statement if it is an
> expression. I have come up with a prototype of such a function by diving
> into Python scope internals and its AST capabilities. It was written using
> Org-mode and tangling so it is thoroughly documented and explained, a test
> suite is included. This interesting exercise made me appreciate Lisp even
> more. Here it is
> https://github.com/smartass101/python_block_eval
> I haven't licensed it yet, because I'm not sure what license would be
> appropriate if it was used by org-mode. Any suggestions?
>
> My proposal is to implement an equivalent of the following bash pseudo
> code for non session mode
>
> python -i << HEREDOC_END
> ret = block_eval("""
> <CODE BLOCK BODY>
> """)
> open(<TMP FILE or PIPE>).write(str(ret))
> HEREDOC_END
>
> For session mode it would be even simpler, lines containing HEREDOC above
> would be dropped and the rest piped directly into the Python REPL.
>
> This also means that the 'org_babel_python_eoe' string indicator may not
> be necessary anymore because end of evaluation would be simply shown by a
> new line with the primary prompt appearing.
>
> The reason why `python -i` (force interactive mode) is used is the IMHO
> poor design choice in the CPython implementation (and other implementations
> have a similar issue AFAIK) to have fast but RO access to local variable
> scope in non-top-level (i.e. functions calling functions) frames/scopes. I
> tried to hack my way around it in the update_locals_after_eval branch of my
> repo to no avail, perhaps some Pythonista among you may know a solution.
>
> I also favor piping input into `python -i` because it means that a
> temporary file does not have to be created.
>
> As explained in the README.org in my repo, this inconsistency can be
> worked around by explicitly first evaluating the side-effect-only part of
> the block and than the last expression with a direct eval() call for each.
> This makes it longer by 2 lines, but has the advantage of properly handling
> variable scope and separating side-effects, which could be used to e.g.
> suppress output. Nevertheless, I think that for Org-mode Babel usage the
> `python -i` and block_eval() approach suffices, unless someone finds a way
> to use the advantages of the alternative approach to improve ob-python.el
> even further.
>
> I'm not a skilled Elisp programmer, so I wanted to ask around as to the
> feasibility of this endeavor or possibly availability of helping hands
> before I devote more time to this.
>
> Kind regards,
> Ondřej Grover
>