On 11 Jul, 2010, at 19:35, Bill Janssen wrote:
Tal Einat <taleinat@gmail.com> wrote:
Although several people say that they think having IDLE in the stdlib is important, the fact is that IDLE is considered quite unimportant by most of the Python community. Having IDLE in the stdlib may be convenient for a few people, but most never use it and don't care about it. I think that in its current state, IDLE may still be helpful for learning Python, but it is more likely to drive away users who run into its various quirks and problems. And for experienced Python developers, very few actually use IDLE, and those who do could easily install it if it weren't part of the stdlib.
I agree with you on this, Tal. On OS X, this is particularly aggravating, as the Apple-supplied Python doesn't seem to include a working version, and installing MacPython leads to other problems (see, for instance, the thread at http://groups.google.com/group/nltk-users/browse_thread/thread/e14b647243ca5...).
Apple doesn't ship IDLE.app, but does ship the rest of the code. It should be fairly easy to create a small IDLE.app using the python.org source tree that uses /usr/bin/python. Ronald