Question

My application (C#/WPF) creates Python code for users who are not programmers – they have a selection of drag & drop items and so they create a sequence that the app translates to Python.

That being said, they’d like to add debug capabilities – the option to inject inputs into their sequence during execution (for example, change myVar‘s value from 1 to 2). From what I understand, I should be able to translate that into Python’s input(). I’ve been trying to understand how it works and got the following error(using PythonWin):

>>> a = 1
>>> input('--:)')
--:)>>> a=2
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<interactive input>", line 1, in <module>
  File "<string>", line 1
    a=2
     ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

What am I doing wrong?
(Also, some tutorial for debugging capabilities in Python – including input() will be appreciated.)

Edit
We’re working with Python 2.6.6. No need for IronPython – it’s executed in Python environment.

Answer 1

According to python documentation, input() method is equivalent to eval(raw_input(prompt)) and eval() can be used to evaluate expressions only.

So for example this code is valid:

>>> a=1 
>>> input('--:)')
--:) a+1
2

but a=2 is a statement so you have to use exec() method to execute it, here is an example:

>>> exec(raw_input())
a=2
>>> a
2