Is there a "reset" in Idle?

[Alex Martelli]

Fredrik Lundh wrote:

> Alex Martelli wrote:
>>         ...
>> > If I had any influence in the development of Python as a whole, I'd
>> > urge the developers to divert their attention away from sexy new
>> > language features and concentrate for a couple of releases on
>> > addressing shotcomings that shag the IDEs.
>>
>> I don't think there are any.  As long as the IDE runs the Python
>> application being debugged in a separate process (a pretty obvious
>> need -- pity that neither IDLE nor PythonWin do that), what would
>> those shortcomings be?
> 
> lack of support for in-process editing of Python code
> (reload doesn't help much).

I guess I don't really get the "in-process" part of this -- isn't
it necessary anyway to use a separate process in the general case?

E.g. to ensure _every_ resource currently held by the application
being debugged is dropped and obtained again from scratch (many of
those resources could be external-to-Python entities which -- it
seems to me, but I guess I may be missing something -- only an OS
level end-process-and-restart could ensure are dropped/re-obtained,
no?).  Maybe there could be some support for checkpointing a Python
based process and "restart-from-checkpoint" to ease this (now THAT
would be a dream, getting that "for free" from the infrastructure
rather than having to code it for each application that's meant to
run for a long time and must survive power loss/restart etc... not
just for debugging... but I find it somewhat hard to envision a
sufficiently-general mechanism, at least offhand).


Alex