If anyone wants to add remote execution in interactive mode to IDLE, I suggest joining the idle-dev list and contributing to the IDLE fork at http://sourceforge.net/projects/idlefork. That source tree includes my changes, but I no longer have time to work on it.
Dave
Thanks for spelling this out Dave. I was wondering if I was pushing the envelope vs. what IDLE is able to handle, and you've confirmed my suspicion. I agree with what you say about scripts (easier to debug and so on), but surely you agree that an intuitive IDLE wouldn't care, i.e. it may be a convenience for the user to do Tk stuff only in scripts, but IDLE itself should at least allow interactive function defs with Tk included. It really should be a user option to enter defs right at the command line. Looking through 'Python and Tkinter Programming', I don't find any of these caveats re IDLE (I'll have to go back and check the Python docs, but I don't recall anything there either). Presumably IDLE is kind of "off to the side" and serious development work doesn't involve using it. But a newbie from Windows world isn't necessarily going to know that, especially given IDLE is bundled and is typically the first thing such a user will see (there's no real incentive to use the DOS box environment, given all that IDLE offers). Likewise in the KDE and GNOME shells: IDLE shows up as an IDE, a development environment, in at least some Linux distros (Mandrake in my case). So I think the literture is deficient in not underscoring this rather important limitation: IDLE is not suitable for doing Tkinter programming. That should be stated clearly and up front, if true, lest too many newbies get disillusioned with the experience of non-working code. I realize that it's more the culture to try to dive in and fix (as you've been doing), vs. to sit around and whine about stuff. Point taken. But it would have been a time saver, for me, to know what wasn't going to work in the first place. I want to give realistic assessments of technologies to educators, and if IDLE isn't useful in some respects, I don't like to always learn the hard way. Fortunately, in this case, I haven't already pushed IDLE + simple Tk scripting as a useful learning environment. I'm sure there's a lot of technical fine points that could be made in this area. I don't want to spread misinformation if I have the wrong idea. Kirby