Structure of program development

[Jussi Piitulainen]

Michael Smolen writes:

> Folks:
>
> 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?

This is indeed possible.

If you can find your way to a command line of your operating system and
launch a Python interactive session by typing "python" or "python3" to
the command prompt and pressing the enter key, then you have access to
the program that can execute your Python code that is in the file that
you created with a text editor. All you have to do is, give the name of
your file as an argument to python or python3. You get a stack trace,
fix your program, and try again.

Some text editors understand Python syntax, or can be set to understand
Python syntax, just like they support Perl and many other languages.
This is merely a convenience. Python need not know what you used to
write the code.

> 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 straightforward thing is to have Python installed.

Beyond that, I don't have personal experience, so I won't offer any
advice. Others will know.