Project organization and import redux

[Hamilton, William]

I apologize for bringing up something that's a month dead. But, I've
been reading through the recent archives and came across this
discussion, and want to make sure I understand a particular about the
interactive prompt.

I'm perfectly well aware that I'm not going to be able to reload a
widget in the middle of a running GUI app, for example. I'm not
looking for gotcha free, I'll settle for minimally useful.

Here's an analogy. In C, you can do an incremental build and run your
modified application without having to first reboot your computer. In
Python, where reload() is essentially the incremental build process,
and the interpreter is essentially a virtual machine, you guys are
saying that my best option is to just "reboot" the virtual machine to
make sure I have a "clean slate". It may be the path of least
resistance, but to say that it is necessary or inevitable is 1960s
mainframe thinking.

Yes, the interpreter is a virtual machine. But the interactive prompt
is not a command line in that virtual machine. Instead, it is the
statement that is about to be executed by a program running in that
virtual machine. When you type a statement and press enter, that
statement is executed as the next line of the program. It's analogous
to using a debugger to step through a C program line by line, except
you're providing those lines immediately rather than having to write and
compile them in advance.

Restarting the interactive prompt isn't like rebooting the computer;
it's just restarting a program that is running on the computer. At
worst, the interpreter is a computer that automatically shuts down when
the program running on it ends.


Is this a valid understanding of the workings of the interactive prompt,
or am I way off base?