Ian Bicking wrote: > There's some similar issues being considered for OLPC. Specifically the > laptop has a "view source" key, which (unsurprisingly) lets you view the > source of what you are doing. What that means is application (aka > "Activity") specific, but a general Python solution is called for. > > Of course it's a little hard to say what that actually should be. Just > a text editor? Not too exciting. Really there should be a view of the > process. And some way to manipulate the in-process objects and source.
When I hear something like this, I think of pipelines or trees of self-contained components rather than source-level objects. Wasn't there a talk at EuroPython 2006 about data processing that covered this approach? [...] > Of course, at some point you need complete power, which means editing > the source in ways that can only be meaningful when you restart the > process from scratch. I'm not sure how or where to make that break. > OTOH, emphasizing clean/fast/easy restarts might be more general and > easier to implement than in-process persistent editing. In many ways, it's more interesting to consider making modified copies of existing processes. It avoids difficult issues with in-process interaction and encourages something like a prototype-based approach. It seems to me that this might work well with simple components, but maybe I'm just trying to avoid facing those difficult issues. :-/ > I'm also not sure what to build on, or what to use. It's interesting > that you felt out-of-process interaction was successful. This fits with > my own intuition that in-process stuff can be dangerous and fragile. > But I'm not that familiar with the details of how the interprocess > communication should happen; perhaps IDLE is a good place to start > looking. Perhaps IDLE is a good place to start the development? My experiments have led me to believe that interaction between processes using their standard input, output and error streams is a fairly robust foundation on which to implement out-of-process editing facilities for use with simple editing environments. David _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
