[Edu-sig] OLPC: first thoughts on the first keynote at Pycon

[Paul D. Fernhout]

There may be one major semantical issue, in terms of the meaning of side 
effects when loading a module  (e.g. defining singletons, opening files, 
etc.) which is hard to deal with generically with Python. You can deal 
with is specifically in how you write your own code, but that is not a 
general solution.

See my previous note to Andreas for more details, including a related 
Python patch someone submitted in 2005.

--Paul Fernhout

kirby urner wrote:
> On 2/23/07, Paul D. Fernhout <pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>>Anyway, there is no inherent reason Python can not do what Smalltalk does
>>-- although it might require some minor changes to the VM to debug and
>>restart exceptions; Python just does not do it, I suspect in part because
>>key Pythoneers may just not understand what they are missing and think
>>module reloading is the same thing. :-) I predict if Guido added this one
>>set of related features to Python, it would be a very short time before
>>everyone wondered how they lived without it before. :-)
> 
> 
> You may be right, although if I understand your aright, it's neither
> the syntax nor semantics of Python that are at issue, but the IDE and
> its ability to permit debugging on the fly, using thrown exceptions as
> restart points of some kind.  Sounds cool.  Don't have to wait for
> Guido, might be able to retrofit it for earlier Pythons.