How useful do you find the interactive interpreter?

Tom Good Tom_Good1 at excite.com
Mon Jun 25 17:58:58 EDT 2001


slaytanic_killer at disinfo.net (slaytanic killer) wrote in message news:<4688f24b.0106231658.43d2c446 at posting.google.com>...
> Hi,
> 
> I am looking at Python seriously, and I can see that the interpreter
> would be really good for testing out ideas.  Getting small things to
> work and then switching over to a text editor to generalize what I've
> learned.  Is this how people generally use it?  Or is it an even
> deeper part of coding?
> 
> Thanks.

I use it all the time for developing ideas and for interactive testing
of objects.

I do interactive testing/experimenting a lot from the interactive
shell, like this:

import foo

foo.someFunction(improvisedTestData)

[see that it didn't do what I expected, go edit foo.py]

reload(foo)

foo.someFunction(improvisedTestData)

[now it works]



Only trouble is, then when I switch back to Java or C++, I tend to
edit my code, *forget* to recompile it, then run it and wonder why
nothing changed :-)


Tom



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