On Fri, 28 Dec 2007 12:54:57 -0800, John Nagle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Actually, the ability to "fix a running program" [in Lisp] isn't >that useful in real life. It's more cool than useful. Editing a >program from a break was more important back when computers were slower >and just rerunning from the beginning was expensive. Speak for yourself. The ability to patch a running program is very useful for certain types of embedded applications. Not every program having high availability requirements can be restarted quickly, or can be implemented reasonably using multiple servers or processes to allow rolling restarts. I worked with real time programs that required external machinery to operate and several minutes to reinitialize and recover from a cold restart. Debugging non-trivial code changes could take hours or days without the ability to hot patch and continue. I know not everyone works in RT, but I can't possibly be alone in developing applications that are hard to restart effectively. That all said, online compilation such as in Lisp is only one of several ways of replacing running code. Whether it is the best way is open for debate. George -- for email reply remove "/" from address -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
