Is it possible to manually change/update a variable inside a loop while it is running in python

Question

Here is my stupid question: say we have a simple for-loop as follows:

import time

for i in range(6):
   x = i ** 1
   time.sleep(5) #sleep for 5s
   print(x)

While this loop is running (e.g. 11 s after we initiated the code), we decide to change/update x = i ** 1 to x = i ** 2 to get the output for the new x. Is there any way to do this, i.e. manually updating the variable inside a loop while it's running (and obviously we do not want to use input).

Thanks!

Note that what you describe is not changing the variable (value) but changing the code that updates the variable. — luk2302, Oct 26 '21 at 08:07
Would something like this help? https://stackoverflow.com/q/1335507/1639625 — tobias_k, Oct 26 '21 at 08:14

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 26 '21 at 08:16

Since python is by default thread-locking, you cannot change the value of your variable without designing your code to do so. However, if you are using threads (see threading docs here), you can create two different threads which will run parallel, asynchrously. By accesssing the same variable (needs to be in same scope or global), you can change it while your loop is still running.
It is, however, not best practice to do so since most of the time you can't tell which operation will happen first due to how CPUs will process their work.

Is it possible to manually change/update a variable inside a loop while it is running in python

1 Answers1