Writing to function arguments during execution

[John O'Hagan]

I'm writing a (music-generating) program incorporating a generator function
which takes dictionaries as its arguments. I want to be able to change the
values of the arguments while the program is running. I have it working as in
this toy example (python 2.5):

from sys import argv
from threading import Thread
from my_functions import option_processor, work

#Make a dictionary of arguments to the main "work" function
argdict = option_processor(argv[1:])

def argdict_rewriter(argdict):
"""Write new values to a dictionary of arguments"""
while 1:
new_dict = option_processor(raw_input().split())
argdict.update(new_dict)

#Write to the dictionary while program is running
rewriter = Thread(target=argdict_rewriter, args=(argdict,))
rewriter.setDaemon(True)
rewriter.start()

#The main generator function
work(argdict)

Now I can change the output of the "work" function while it's running via
raw_input(). However it's very crude, not least because the terminal echo of
the new options is interspersed with the output of the program.

In future I hope to be able to have several instances of the "work" function
running as threads simultaneously, and to separately control the arguments to
each.

I think the general problem is how to send output from a thread to a different
place from that of its parent thread, but I'm not sure.

Is there a standard way to do this kind of thing? In particular, I'm after a
solution whereby I can enter new arguments in one terminal window and observe
the program's output in another.

Regards,

John