[Edu-sig] interactive vs compiled from file

[Dethe Elza]

> > Thanks, Dethe, that's very nice, and also thanks for your signature,
> > which is thought provoking indeed.

I'm glad you found the snippet helpful (and also the sig).

> Yes, thanks Dethe.  And your pointer about sys.displayhook may be  
> just what was needed so that I could embed IPython as an  
> alternative shell within Crunchy - without interfering with the  
> other shells!   I just need to experiment a bit more...

That's cool, glad to play a part in the evolution of Crunchy.

> > Does anyone agree with me about the didactic value of this change?

Apart from the challenge of being able to turn off echoing, I'm not  
convinced it's a good idea.  It seems to me that it should be  
relatively easy to explain.  Also, with the naive replacement of the  
displayhook I demonstrated, you lose the underscore value (normally  
in the interpreter the _ variable holds the last result that was  
echoed).  This is useful when exploring, because sometimes you will  
test several things, and then when it works, you have it saved in _  
without having to retrace your steps.  I'm more inclined to go  
further and use IPython (which has vastly *more* changes from the non- 
interactive Python runtime) for all the nice tools it gives explorers.

On the other hand, my kids are just now starting to explore Python,  
so I don't have much practical experience to share.  Yet.

Unrelated digression:

My six-year-old is trying to program Python in Scratch, which is  
interesting, because he doesn't really know anything about Python  
beyond "you type in words and it does stuff." So he's essentially  
inventing parsing on his own, in a language that makes text parsing  
amazingly difficult.  Scratch makes getting the basics very easy, but  
I think by the time I get my PyGame-based scratch-like environment  
ready for my kids, they will find Python's relative lack of arbitrary  
limits to be very refreshing.

--Dethe

Every day computers are making people easier to use. --David Tompkin