Christopher D writes:
I'm currently working through your book and enjoying it immensely. The following is baffling me though, so hoping you can help.
In Chapter 13, page 197 (after creating the ball object), you wrote: "If you run this program now using Run>Module, the canvas will appear for a split second and then vanish". You then go on to write about how its necessary to add the animation loop to stop this happening.
My window appears and draws the ball correctly, but does not vanish. Reading through the code I don't understand why it's expected to disappear either. This seems to be a key point so would be grateful if you could shed light! I'm running Python 3.4.1 by the way.
Thank you in advance for your help!
You've found an error in the book, I'm afraid. If you run the code using the Python console (try it by opening a command prompt, or terminal, and running python bounce.py), the window will indeed appear and vanish. The basic idea is, there's nothing left for it to do, so no reason for the window to remain open. That's the reason for adding an animation loop of some kind (in the book I use a very basic while-loop, but tkinter also has a mainloop function for doing this).
However, when you run the same code with Idle (the Python Shell), which is written using tkinter, the window remains open because there's already a main loop running (started by the Shell itself). So the book is both right and wrong, I guess, depending on how you want to run the code.
The errata has been updated accordingly. Thanks for the "bug report".