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Comment by louisgoddard | Hacker News Reader

There's some info in a Stack Overflow answer here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4891642/interpreter-for-t...

"Apple started officially allowing programming language interpreters in the iOS App store late Q3 of 2010 (they changed their SDK agreement to clarify this). However interpreters (except for Javascript in a UIWebview) are not allowed to run any downloaded code. Only code built into the app, or typed in by the user."

Not sure where he's getting that from, though.

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Thanks, I shall go and have a look and see what this supports.

I have recently been convincing various family members and friends that they should buy their children a real, cheap, laptop instead of an iPad. If you can only have one machine, I think it should be one they can create their own content on, just in case they want to go that route.

I know the iPad has a few things (art programs), but it isn't a replacement for a computer. Worryingly many people seem to think it is, for children (who I would hope would be creative).

Yeah, it certainly doesn't seem like a good idea to lock a child into such a closed environment, particularly if it's one of their earliest exposures to computers in general.

The developer of Python for iOS, Jonathan Hosmer, mentions that he is prevented by App store policy to provide the functionality of importing external sources into the app.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3633968

However, another HN user found a clever workaround using python's builtin exec and urlib:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3634837 http://myblog.rsynnott.com/2012/02/fun-with-python-for-ios.h...

My name is in the credits for Python for iOS as I provided the pure python patches for urllib to even work in the first place :)

There is also a link in the credits next to my name for my github repo which contains the original patches, plus some new code I just uploaded (shpy - a pure python shell-alike, with bash-like file name globbing and file download + unzip)

https://github.com/pudquick/PythonForiOSPatches

I also was involved in working with the requests/urllib3 maintainers to get these modules working in Python for iOS, as it didn't originally ship with ssl support.

My original patches could self-install with a simple one-liner copy&paste, which then gave you the '_rp' module (now included in the app).

I will add a similar one-liner for the installation of shpy (and better documentation) but should you get it installed, operation is as follows:

from shpy import *

shpy()

Currently there is a bug with raw_input where the prompt is printing after text has been entered, so I'm working around that right now.

I also plan on adding untar support, PyPI pure python module installation, and WebDAV.

If you have questions, let me know.

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