I don't much about python (something I really should remedy one of these days
) or p14p, but here are some things to keep in mind
1) CHDK doesn't have a full ANSI runtime library. Functions need to either be found in the firmware, or implemented from scratch. The functions we do use may not confirm exactly to standards.
2) CHDK code has relatively little memory available. Typically, ports have a few hundred kb to a 1 mb available to play with. From the looks of it, p14p should should be fine with this.
3) In the current scripting setup, a scripting engine needs to be explicitly aware of and play nicely with task scheduling. The script interpreters run in kbd_task. kbd_task needs to run it's non-script related code regularly, and various calls in the script code (such as waiting for a key press) need to yield back from the scripting engine. You should look at the 'action stack' code to get a feel for how this works. The script engine should also be able to yield periodically so a tight loop in script doesn't lock up the camera UI, see the debug hook usage in the lua implementation for this.
4) A scripting implementation will likely need a significant amount of "glue" to access useful camera functionality (see luascript.c as an example).
As to whether we need an additional interpreter: From my point of view, it seems like more maintenance work without a lot of obvious benefit. Lua is a sufficiently capable language for the kinds of things you can do in a scripting environment. The only reason we have both ubasic and lua is that ubasic was there first, and is NOT capable enough to do a lot of the things you would want to do in a scripting language.
However, if enough people prefer python over Lua, it might prove valuable.
