That's because you're doing it in interactive mode. In interactive mode, the code is treated like commands, it is executed immediately after the command is finished. You may differentiate Interactive Mode and Normal/Coding Mode by the prompt, in Coding Mode there is no prompt cause, in Interactive mode, there is the '>>>' (default)
Example in Interactive Mode: >>> print 'Blah blah blah' Blah blah blah >>> for i in xrange(5): ... print i ... 0 1 2 3 4 >>> Some "commands", like 'for', 'while', dictionary literal, etc may require more than one line, for those, the secondary prompt is shown '...', although that depends on how you start python, if you started python from IDLE, the secondary prompt is not, by default, shown. That's a bit basic. Now to the specific reason why python (interactive mode) "doesn't wait" you to finish your command. In interactive mode, a blank line is considered to be the end of multi-line command, so: >>> for i in xrange(4): ... print i ... # The next line is empty ... 0 1 2 3 >>> that empty line is an instruction to start executing the multi-line commands immediately (or another way to see it, an empty line is considered to be the end of current instruction) _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
