python wrote: > so how can i use python to debug code and change that code without having to > restart the code.
I don't know how well the commercial GUIs, such as Wing IDE manage to handle debugging. Perhaps that's worth looking into. It's my impression that debugger support in Python is weaker than e.g. VB, because Python programmers don't need and use debuggers so much. I think there are several reasons for this: - It's easy to experiment with code in the interactive interpreter. - Python programs don't dump. There is rarely a need to put a breakpoint at some known safe place and single-step from there until it crashes, and then redo everything, trying to find at what place before the crash you really had your bug. You'll almost always get a controlled exception in Python. - The tracebacks you get when exceptions appear are very informative, and typically enough to spot the bugs more or less at once. I debugged python programs I've never seen before last night and today. There were maybe half a dozen bugs, and in all cases, the tracebacks showed me exactly what I needed to do to fix the problems at once. - Due to Python's expressiveness, typical Python programs are shorter and simpler than comparable programs written in other languages. If you have spaghetti code, you really need to single-step to understand what is going on. Python code is typically well structured. - With Python, it's common that people write unit tests using e.g. the unittest or doctest libraries. With a test driven approach as described in Extreme Programming, you run your tests very often, with small changes in the code between each test run. - With object-oriented programming, it's easier to structure your code so that each chunk of code (e.g. method) is easy to understand. In other words, the divide and conquer approach to problem solving works better. I guess another reason is that Microsoft has put a lot of money into making VB and friends user friendly. These products are very much geared into accomodating beginners, and a nice looking GUI has been a very high priority. For an open source tool such as Python, where the people who drive development are the people who need to use the tool, being beginner friendly isn't the top priority (even though Python has succeeded well in that regard anyway). Aspects such as stability and consistency in semantics is considered much more important. (VB has a prettier GUI, but Python is a much prettier language...) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
