Just starting to learn Python and going through the Tutorial in the Help file. FWIW, I'm a hobbyist programmer -- not extremely knowledgeable, but not entirely clueless.
In 6.1.2 of the Tutorial, I find this: "The modification time of the version of spam.py used to create spam.pyc is recorded in spam.pyc, and the .pyc file is ignored if these don't match." Either I don't understand this, or it isn't correct. Working through the tutorial, I created a file called fibo.py in my text editor, and imported it into Idle. It worked as expected. I then edited the file and resaved it. I used del fibo, followed by import fibo. My edits are not accessible in Idle. Python seems still to be importing the earlier version of fibo.pyc, even though the modification time of fibo.py is now different. (I'm in Windows XP, if that makes a difference.) I consistently get the error message "AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'xyz'", even though I've just defined a new function xyz in fibo.py and saved the file, then deleted and reimported. One point of possible confusion here is in the line in the following paragraph of 6.1.2, "Whenever spam.py is successfully compiled...." My question is, is it compiled when being imported? I didn't spot any mention in the Tutorial of when or how a .py file might be (or would automatically be) compiled, so I'm assuming that it's automatically compiled while being imported. If this is a bad assumption, then maybe it's the root of my misunderstanding. Maybe I have to _do_ something to fibo.py in order to create a new version of fibo.pyc. Sorry to be so long-winded, but I want to be precise about this. Can anyone clarify for me what's happening here? Thanks! --Jim Aikin -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
