By wandering faculty, I mean you're invited to gigs in a room you don't control and maybe have never seen before -- my situation rather often. A lab tech has likely installed Python ahead of time, but in a lab situation, there's always the question of rights, especially write rights. The typical thing is to not know or care about /site-packages, and so to have no writable access to *any* disk space on the default Python path. Your mileage may vary.
We have several ways of addressing this situation, both from within the bash shell (if using Linux or maybe OS X) or from within Windows. To keep things Pythonic, I mix the subject of namespaces, essential early Python, with the example of sys, and sys.path in particular. Here's an importable resource you're able to append to, meaning whatever home directory you *can* write to is appendable to sys.path per this session. And that's a good thing. Plus it reinforces the core concept: import menagerie as zoo and/or from zoo import Dog, Monkey, Human. Many side bar topics also feature (including escape characters, if you want to stick with Windows backslash notation -- I have a take-it-or-leave-it attitude, as Python is quite willing to use forward slashes even on Windows). I like this segment for another reason: unlike some educators, I have no interest in "shielding" my students from the gross reality of some hunkering OS, complete with kernel, GUI resources and whathaveyou. Yes, a Linux system is huge and complicated. No, I don't favor "insulating" students from that hugeness, by constructing some dream world atop it and inside it, but unaware of it. This whole idea that we must "protect" students from this context is an anathema to me, as it's hypocritical. The people who *build* your pseudo or virtual reality need to know about these underlayers, these pipeworks and clockworks. Their not wanting to clue you in is a sign they're not treating you as a peer, but as a rat in some maze of their own devising. It may sound like I'm taking aim at Squeak here, but I'm not really. Squeak provides a more open source world that goes almost to the chip, just like Linux. You have access to the source code if you want it, down to where SmallTalk meets C, at which point there's not a lot to see (others have commented on this piece -- what Python might stand to gain from once the intended meetings happen in the Bay Area). More I'm taking aim at curricula which haven't discussed the file tree by the time we're dealing with 15 year olds. If you're already 15, and have no access to a bash shell, or the concepts of hard disk and filesystem, then IF you're actually using a hard drive with a file system, you're being ripped off, big time. Time to shop for a smarter set of teachers. Learn about partitions, standard trees and variants, search paths, config files. Don't let them hide that stuff behind a curtain. Kirby _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
