I don't know in what context "hot editing" was used to start this thread, but what I read in it is the idea that you can change code while it's running. Edit and continue has a different feel to it, because it works by a different method, by literally patching memory that the suspended thread is going to execute. It has the convenience of stopping the execution of the program before the patch is done. What "hot editing" in, say, Smalltalk has been able to do is you can have a live program running, you can call up a class that the thread uses, change the code in a method, compile it, while the thread is still running, and instantly see the change take effect. The reason it can do this is that method dispatch is late-bound. In .Net it's bound early. Late binding allows much more of a sense of experimentation. You don't have to stop anything. You just change it like you're changing a setting in an app., and you can see the change instantly. This gives you the feel that programming is much more fluid than the typical "stop, edit, compile, debug" cycle.
