The C programs are modified from a c program used in Maynard Python assembler for Python 3.3-3.6

The following is from Maynard:

Copyright 2013-2015 by Larry Hastings

When you create a bytecode function in Python, you have to tell Python how deep the function's stack will ever go. To do that, you need to know how each opcode will affect the stack--that opcode's "stack effect".

Prior to Python 3.4, Python programmers didn't have any way to look up the stack effect of a bytecode. I (Larry Hastings) wrote these compute_stackeffect tools so that Maynard could calculate stack effects.

Python 3.4 added a new function, opcode.stack_effect(). So these tools were only necessary to support Python 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3.