useful tool for c.l.p

[Behrang Dadsetan]

I just read through a few posts and something striked me.

Many people, just like myself, are too lazy to test the python code they
post here. Most of the time, of course, the code either runs well or the
person asking at least understands what is meant and can fix eventual bugs.

Would it not be wonderful to have some kind of integrated python
interpreter within the news agent/email program, so one could kinda
select the concerned code (or better, it is automaticly spotted) and
just let it run within the mail?

Sorry.. it is late here (past 3am) and since a few weeks I really wonder
what the point is being in 2003.. somehow I so often feel that we are in
stone age... Especially we, in the IT world, are really late in
Information Technology..

Regards,
Ben.

PS: Yes I know.. making a super-addin working with all email/news agents
of the planet does not seem neither worth the effort nor very easily
implemented.
PPS: No, do not worry. I am going to sleep right now and will stop
complaining about why the world is so annoying by the end of this sentence.

 

[Terry Reedy]

I just read through a few posts and something striked me.

Many people, just like myself, are too lazy to test the python code they
post here. Most of the time, of course, the code either runs well or the
person asking at least understands what is meant and can fix

eventual bugs.

Careful people, like myself, have learned, often through embarrassing
experience, to either note <untested> or test, cut, and paste. I
recommend this to everyone for anything much beyond the truely
obvious.

Would it not be wonderful to have some kind of integrated python
interpreter within the news agent/email program, so one could kinda
select the concerned code (or better, it is automaticly spotted) and
just let it run within the mail?

I usually find it easy enough to start up the interpreter and cut and
paste from the draft post. It is a feature of Python that one can do
so so easily.

Terry J. Reedy

 

[Dave Brown]

: Would it not be wonderful to have some kind of integrated python
: interpreter within the news agent/email program, so one could kinda
: select the concerned code (or better, it is automaticly spotted) and
: just let it run within the mail?

But but but...we already have VBScript for that!

However, the Unix world has been kind of lagging in the viruses
department....

--Dave

 

[Bruce Sass]

[Behrang Dadsetan wrote]

Would it not be wonderful to have some kind of integrated python
interpreter within the news agent/email program, so one could kinda
select the concerned code (or better, it is automaticly spotted) and
just let it run within the mail?

That's a nice idea.

However, were you to actually go ahead and implement this idea, we
would then be exposing ourselves to serious security risks, since
people could post malicious code in their posts.

As long as the code is not automatically executed it would not be much
more of a security issue...

As Terry Reedy pointed out, it's not hard to fire up the interpreter
and paste the script into it. Python's conciseness makes that very
easy, even if the whitespace issue sometimes results in mangled code.

....because I don't see a difference between selecting code then
executing it and select, cut'n'paste then execute.

A standard [or] tool could include a sandbox, which you don't get
with a simple cut'n'past into an interpreter.

And I always like to cast an eye over code before I run it, as a quick
sanity check that its not going to do anything I don't want or like
the look of.

Always a good idea.


While playing with Literate Programing (LP) and generally exploring
Python awhile back I put together a proof-of-concept which lets you
place code (noweb markup, can handle multiple files) in an email, have
it automatically extracted when it hits the mail reader, then sent to
an editor or IDE. Executing the code is just a click or keypress
away.

I figured that noweb markup was simple and unobtrusive, and treating
the message as LP (with its "flexible order of elaboration") would be
a good way to include programs, especially long examples, in email.
However, since that sorta thing doesn't happen very often and it is
easy to cut'n'paste, I didn't bother to develop it further.


--- message body example ---

lpmail: label1 label2

....text...

<<label1>>=
....code...
@

....more text...

<<label2>>=
....code...
@

-----

The code is on the 'net at:
http://home.edmc.net/~bsass/lpmail.py

Beware: it is a couple of years old and was a
stream-of-conciousness project... but it works and should only be a
security problem if the code text can tell the editor or IDE to
automatically execute a buffer.


- Bruce