Running autogenerated code in another python instance

[Bengt Richter]

On Thu, 03 Nov 2005 14:23:53 +1000, Paul Cochrane <cochrane at esscc.uq.edu.au> wrote:

>On Wed, 02 Nov 2005 06:33:28 +0000, Bengt Richter wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 2 Nov 2005 06:08:22 +0000 (UTC), Paul Cochrane <cochrane at shake56.esscc.uq.edu.au> wrote:
>> 
>>>Hi all,
>>>
>>>I've got an application that I'm writing that autogenerates python code
>>>which I then execute with exec().  I know that this is not the best way to
>>>run things, and I'm not 100% sure as to what I really should do.  I've had a
>>>look through Programming Python and the Python Cookbook, which have given me
>>>ideas, but nothing has gelled yet, so I thought I'd put the question to the
>>>community.  But first, let me be a little more detailed in what I want to
>>>do:
>>>
>
>Bengt,
>
>Thanks for your reply!
>
>> It's a little hard to tell without knowing more about your
>> user input (command language?) syntax that is translated to
>> or feeds the process that "autogenerates python code".
>Ok, I'll try and clarify things as much as I can.
>
[...snip great reply...]

I owe you another reply, but I started and I couldn't spend the time to
do it justice. But in the meanwhile, I would suggest thinking about how
the MVC (model-view-controller) concept might help you factor things.
ISTM you are already part way there. See

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MVC

for some infos. To that I'd add that if you want a top level interactive visualization tool,
you might want to look at it like a kind of IDE, where you might want a few workspace/project kind
of top level commands to help manage what you would otherwise do by way of manually creating
directory subtrees for various things etc. Anyway, if you want to use template code and edit
it and then compile and run it, you could select templates and make working copies automatically
and invoke some favorite editor on it from the top level command interpreter. Having these
pieces consistently arranged in projects/workspaces and shared template spaces etc. would
make it a single command to create a fresh space and not worry about colliding with something
you did just to show someone a little demo, etc. This is not the central topic, but good useability
is nice ;-)

That way if you just wanted to re-run something, you'd just select it and skip calling the
editor. Or if a step was to generate data, you could either create the data source program
by several steps or possibly just go on to define or invoke a visualization step with
a particular renderer and/or output, knowing that the data source was already set up in a
standard way. You could also consider borrowing unix piping/redirection concepts
for some command syntax, for composition of standard interface actions (not to mention
invoking the real thing in a subprocess when appropriate). Just free-associating here ;-)


Anyway, gotta go for now, sorry.

Regards,
Bengt Richter