I apologize for bringing up something that's a month dead. But, I've been reading through the recent archives and came across this discussion, and want to make sure I understand a particular about the interactive prompt.
"Martin Unsal" <martinunsal at gmail.com> wrote: > I'm perfectly well aware that I'm not going to be able to reload a > widget in the middle of a running GUI app, for example. I'm not > looking for gotcha free, I'll settle for minimally useful. > > Here's an analogy. In C, you can do an incremental build and run your > modified application without having to first reboot your computer. In > Python, where reload() is essentially the incremental build process, > and the interpreter is essentially a virtual machine, you guys are > saying that my best option is to just "reboot" the virtual machine to > make sure I have a "clean slate". It may be the path of least > resistance, but to say that it is necessary or inevitable is 1960s > mainframe thinking. Yes, the interpreter is a virtual machine. But the interactive prompt is not a command line in that virtual machine. Instead, it is the statement that is about to be executed by a program running in that virtual machine. When you type a statement and press enter, that statement is executed as the next line of the program. It's analogous to using a debugger to step through a C program line by line, except you're providing those lines immediately rather than having to write and compile them in advance. Restarting the interactive prompt isn't like rebooting the computer; it's just restarting a program that is running on the computer. At worst, the interpreter is a computer that automatically shuts down when the program running on it ends. Is this a valid understanding of the workings of the interactive prompt, or am I way off base? --- -Bill Hamilton [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list