Here is a more visual example of the technique presented in Logan Koester's article, "Live Coding in Python" (http://www.logankoester.com/mt/2006/07/live_coding_with_python_1.html).
It's very quick-and-dirty in style, partly because half of the program was written in a moment of inspiration, and the other half was written and rewritten in real-time... :-D I've only tested this on Linux, using python 2.4.3. Reports of working or non-working on other platforms are very welcome. You will of course need pygame installed. :-) Paste the following snippets into live.py and livetest.py respectively. Run python live.py. Edit livetest.py while the program is running, and save livetest.py to see your results unfold. Other fun misuses include: (1) running multiple instances at once (slow!) and watching your changes affect them all; (2) nested live coding [live.py reloads live-prime.py, which in turn reloads livetest.py on each iteration]; and (3) having livetest.run() return data, and making live.py cache non-null data received... and pass it back as an argument to livetest.run(). You could then have reachable, usable data (say, a bitmap picture) floating around in your program's running instance, yet no longer mentioned in the program's source code. Ephemeral programming! Enjoy. :-) Julian ################ live.py #################### import pygame from pygame.locals import * from pygame import display try: import livetest except ImportError: livetest = None pygame.init() screen = display.set_mode((800, 600)) step = 0 while 1: try: reload(livetest) except: print "Failed to reload livetest.py" livetest.run(screen, step) step += 1 if step > 2400: # just a nice, round number ;-) step = 0 ################ livetest.py ################ import pygame from pygame.locals import * from pygame import display def run(screen, step): background = 0x00, 0x00, 0x00 textcolor = 0x00, 0xcc, 0xff text = "Live coding rocks!" myfont = pygame.font.SysFont("Arial" , 50) textimg = myfont.render(text, 1, textcolor) x = step % 800 y = step % 600 screen.fill(background) screen.blit(textimg, (x, y)) display.flip() ######################################### -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list