The crunch of finals has been upon us for the past week as we wrap up the semester, my last semester at Tufts. I couldn’t help but notice all the expressions of pain due to the stress of finals from my friends - pain that made me want to make a lame joke about French bread: 🥖. No actual joke, just an expression that I know the word for bread in French and how I couldn’t wait for this all to be over.

Staring at the emoji though, I realized that it looked like a forward slash. So me and my weird, sleep-deprived brain wondered if it’d be possible to use it instead of / for building paths in in Python, like this:

from pathlib import Path
r = Path('🥖')
home_dir = r 🥖 "home" 🥖 "user"
bin_dir = r 🥖 "usr" 🥖 "bin" 

How cool would that be?! And after a bit of research and testing, it turns out it’s completely possible! Using pythonji and some infix operators, here’s the little script I wrote:

$ cat pain.🐍 
#!/usr/bin/env pythonji

from pathlib import Path as 📉

class 🔨:
    def __init__(self, function):
        self.function = function
        
    def __add__(self, other):
        return self.function(other)

    def __radd__(self, other):
        return type(self)(lambda x, self=self, other=other: self.function(other, x))

    def __call__(self, value1, value2):
        return self.function(value1, value2)

🥖 = 🔨(lambda x, y: x / y)
r = 📉('/')
l = r +🥖+ "home" +🥖+ "margret" +🥖+ "dev" +🥖+ "linux"
print(l.parent)

$ ./pain.🐍 
/home/margret/dev

Of course while it’s not exactly just the French bread emoji (being surrounded with +), it’s definitely a lot closer than I thought I would get originally. And while infix operators may technically be a “hack” on Python, I love their flexibility to do weird stuff like this. Off to finish the rest of my finals!

I created the cover photo using Carbon, for those interested.