Structure of program development

[Alan Evangelista]

> I am new to this programming adventure. I've gotten past the introductory chapters in 'How to..." books and now want to start developing a much more complicated program that I will use repeated for different applications. When I worked in Perl there was an option to write a program in a text editor, save it, and then run in with Perl. Is such a thing possible in Python? If not, how do I develop a 500+ lines of code?

Yes. You can do it for every programming language I know, otherwise development would be impossible.

> A second question of the basic design. If I write a program, can I move it to a computer that is without any Python software, or does that machine have to download the Python software? Does Python products contain all parts of a developed program or is it a series of 'call' statements?

The target system must have the Python interpreter and standard library, which are always installed 
together.

A software developed in Python must contain the method calls to the Python standard library, 3rd 
party libraries
and/or custom code. It may or not contain the Python runtime environment (interpreter and std 
library). In Linux,
for instance, it is standard to not include dependencies (eg Python runtime environment) in an 
application, but
reuse the one already installed in the target system.


Regards