Posts tagged ast
Simplifying Logic In Your Python Code
- 13 July 2022
Last week I took a deeper look into some ideas covering boolean logic and how we can derive expressions from truth tables. In that same spirit, I wanted to share my absolute favorite example from my seminar on logic where I covered expression simplification and how it can be used to simplify valid Python flow control statement expressions. Additionally, this approach enabled us to determine whether specific branches were unsolvable meaning that there are branches of code that can never be executed due to a poorly formed conditional statement.
Since we covered how to use The simplify_logic function from SymPy to simplify boolean expressions last week, I wanted to dive straight into parsing Python code using the built-in Abstract Syntax Trees (ast) module. This module exists to parse Python code according to its own grammar rules in a programmatic manner. We can essentially represent valid Python code as a graph of nodes, accounting for various expressions and statements while also inspecting those aspects a little further- and even injecting some custom processing behavior.