Can't we take advantage of inheritance for this issue? I don't know
how far that can go, though, I'm not a programmer...

Thanks

Maurizio

On Sep 28, 9:40 am, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 12:11 AM, Maurizio <maurizio.gran...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > First of all, thank you for the example!
>
> >> I'm pretty sure it is impossible to decide whether a cells output depends 
> >> on the
> >> value of a given variable.  You could get it write some of the time by 
> >> seeing
> >> if the variable appears, but given the dynamic nature of Python it is
> >> impossible to
> >> decide in general.
>
> > What about the preparser? Can't we use it to recognize whether any
> > variable belonging to the "live" list appear in the lines of the
> > current cell? Then, it could just automatically append the "depend"
> > attribute to the cell id.
>
> Sure, one could do that using the preparser.  Unfortunately that
> wouldn't really work because one cell can easily depend on the
> variable x without the letter x explicitly appearing anywhere in the
> cell.  For example, suppose I define a function:
>
> def foo():
>      print x
>
> in one cell, then put
>
> print foo()
>
> in another cell.  The cell with "print foo()" in it depends on the
> value of x, but x is not mentioned explicitly anywhere in that cell.
>
>
>
>
>
> >> That said, if you were allowed to tag a cell as depending, then this is 
> >> easy to
> >> implement.  I've even made an implementation of this in the current 
> >> notebook:
>
> >>http://sagenb.org/home/pub/905/
>
> >> If you try that and evaluate all the cells in order, then you'll see
> >> that changing a and b
> >> causes all the other dependent cells to update.  You can add
> >> non-dependent cells and
> >> they won't update.  Obviously the above is a bit cumbersome, but could
> >> be made smoother
> >> if it gets at what you're after.
>
> >> William
>
> > After all, I'd be glad to see if any interest is shown in this
> > direction, since there is a reasonable amount of work around the
> > notebook now. Otherwise, thank you for the discussion :)
>
> > Maurizio
>
> --
> William Stein
> Associate Professor of Mathematics
> University of Washingtonhttp://wstein.org
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