Deprecating reload() ???

[Hung Jung Lu]

Skip Montanaro <skip at pobox.com> wrote in message news:<mailman.37.1079449131.742.python-list at python.org>...
> 
> Sitting for long periods in an interactive session and expecting it to track
> your changes is foreign to me.  
> ...

Not sure whether this is related to what you are talking about. In
VC/VB, while debugging a program, it is very often to get into this
situation:

(a) you have loops somewhere, (say, from i=0 to i=2000000)
(b) your program fails at some particular points in the loop,
(c) your debugger tells you there is a problem (and maybe you have
some assertion points,) and the execution stops at that point.
(d) you want to add some more debugging code to narrow down the spot,
or narrow down or the condition of the error,
(e) if you do not have good IDE, you'll have to start your program all
over again. But in VC/VB, you just insert some more code, and resume
the execution, all in matter of seconds. And you have much better
insight into the source and nature of the bug. (Is the bug from the
code? Is the bug from the data? What to do? Is the bug from C++? Is
the bug coming from stored-procedure in the database?)

Is this pure theory talk? No, because I just need to use it, now.

Without interactive programming's edit-and-continue feature, very
often you have to stop the program, insert just a few lines of code,
and restart again. This turns really bad when the initial state setup
takes time. Of course, if your programs don't take much initial setup
time, then you won't be able to realize the need or benefit of
edit-and-continue.

Sure, you can unit test things all you want. But in real life,
interactive debugging is, and will always be, the king of bug killers,
especially in large and complex systems.

> Maybe it's just the nature of your users and their background, but an
> (edit/test/run)+ cycle seems much more common in the Python community than a
> run/(edit/reload)+ cycle.  

It all depends. For Zope's external methods (CGIs), you don't restart
the whole web/app server everytime you make changes to a CGI. The
run/(edit/reload) cycle is the typical behavior of long-running
applications. (Except for some earlier versions of Java and
Microsoft's web/app servers, where you DID have to restart. And that
was very annoying.)

An analogy is with Windows 95, where everytime you install/update an
application you need to reboot the OS. We know how annoying that is.
Edit-and-continue addresses a similar problem.

By the way, I am told that Common Lisp also has good edit-and-continue
feature.

regards,

Hung Jung