On Wed, 18 Mar 2009 at 16:56, Arc Riley wrote:

Summer of Code is ramping up. Every year the common complaint is that not enough Python core projects get proposed by students, and of course a big reason for that is often the only encouragement we offer prospective students is a link to the PEP index.

So let's make this year different.

Accepted students are paid a total of $4500 to work for roughly 30 hours a week, 12 weeks, on their proposed project.

The challenge is finding project ideas for them that could reasonably occupy them for the entire Summer and which the results of their work can be demonstrated. They're being paid for specific projects so "Spend the Summer

How about improving 2to3? Seems like that could be an interesting, challenging, useful, and rewarding project :). -- R. David Murray http://www.bitdance.com

Hello Arc, Arc Riley writes:

I've seen and heard that a lot of work is still needed on http://svn.python.org

/view/python/trunk both during the 3.1 release cycle, optimization possible all over the place. Well, first, it's too late for 3.1, which will (should) be out before July. Second, all the eagerly needed optimization work on py3k has now been done. A quick skim through the bug tracker's "performance" and "feature request" tickets did not seem to yield anything interesting and big enough for a GSOC project (although I could have overlooked something). Rather than performance, I think some more interesting areas would be related to some of the standard library modules. For instance, the unittest module could welcome some new features (test discovery, support for skipped tests, probably others that I'm forgetting about). Since this is pure Python stuff not needing any deep experience with the interpreter's internals, it would be appropriate for an outsider. Regards Antoine.

Terry Reedy writes:

Or the much requested 3to2 using the same tools.

I didn't know there was such a request. I thought it was only a PyPy April fool.

2009/3/18 Arc Riley :

I've heard from four people that improving 2to3 would be a great project (plus many more suggesting "port X to Python 3" as project ideas).

Ok. That's excellent.

Note the SoC timeline; http://socghop.appspot.com/document/show/program/google/gsoc2009/timeline

So maybe it won't work for 3.1, but perhaps 3.1.1? 3.2?

Well, there won't be any major changes in 3.1.1, but 3.2 is definitely open.

We should have many ideas up for students to consider.  The more student who apply and the more mentors we have ready determines how many students we get total.

As part of this I should add, we need at least one mentor per student, preferably two.  These should be people familiar with and actively working in the area the student would be.  We're putting mentor contact info on the wiki so potential students can hash out the details with them before applying.

-- Regards, Benjamin

There are different patches to improve regex library. You can start with: http://bugs.python.org/issue2636 I don't know that status of the issues, but it can be an interresting project. -- Victor Stinner aka haypo http://www.haypocalc.com/blog/

...

Note the SoC timeline;

http://socghop.appspot.com/document/show/program/google/gsoc2009/timeline

...

So maybe it won't work for 3.1, but perhaps 3.1.1? 3.2?

Well, there won't be any major changes in 3.1.1, but 3.2 is definitely open.

Cool, these are of course details you can work out with interested students. Would you be willing to field questions from prospective students and possibly mentor one? The process is as follows; we're compiling ideas for http://wiki.python.org/moin/SummerOfCode/2009 and getting mentors signed up at http://socghop.appspot.com/ Students are already starting to look over the different organizations ideas pages and connect with mentors. Student application period opens next week. All the mentors for PSF read and review them and we assign mentors to them (often whatever mentor the student worked with to build the proposal). Do you want prospective students contacting the list or the mentor they're interested in working with directly?

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 09:24:25PM +0000, Antoine Pitrou wrote: -> Rather than performance, I think some more interesting areas would be related to -> some of the standard library modules. For instance, the unittest module could -> welcome some new features (test discovery, support for skipped tests, probably -> others that I'm forgetting about). Since this is pure Python stuff not needing -> any deep experience with the interpreter's internals, it would be appropriate -> for an outsider. Hi Antoine, interesting idea -- but I've seen too many arguments about what the *right* functionality to add to unittest would be to want to give it to a student. I think a student would probably not be willing or able to fight the battles necessary to get his/her changes into the core... cheers, --titus -- C. Titus Brown, ctb@msu.edu

2009/3/18 Terry Reedy

R. David Murray wrote:

How about improving 2to3? Seems like that could be an interesting,

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challenging, useful, and rewarding project :).

Or the much requested 3to2 using the same tools.

I'm not in a position to mentor this, but I too think this would be a great thing to have. -Brett

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 14:56, Benjamin Peterson wrote:

2009/3/18 Arc Riley :

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Note the SoC timeline;

http://socghop.appspot.com/document/show/program/google/gsoc2009/timeline

...

So maybe it won't work for 3.1, but perhaps 3.1.1? 3.2?

Well, there won't be any major changes in 3.1.1, but 3.2 is definitely open.

Cool, these are of course details you can work out with interested students.

Would you be willing to field questions from prospective students and possibly mentor one?

Certainly

I would double-check Benjamin can do this since I don't think he will be 18 by the time GSoC starts. The FAQ at http://socghop.appspot.com/document/show/program/google/gsoc2009/faqs#mentor... to suggest it won't be an issue, but you never know. Also be aware that a university student might not like being told what to do by someone in high school (although if they want $4500 they better). -Brett

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 6:13 PM, Brett Cannon wrote:

I would double-check Benjamin can do this since I don't think he will be 18 by the time GSoC starts. The FAQ at http://socghop.appspot.com/document/show/program/google/gsoc2009/faqs#mentor... to suggest it won't be an issue, but you never know.

Also be aware that a university student might not like being told what to do by someone in high school (although if they want $4500 they better).

This isn't a problem. Drupal had a GHOP (SoC for highschool students) mentor who was too young to be a student (11 or 12 at the time), I believe Dmitri also served them as a SoC mentor, I know several SoC mentors are teenagers. I'd rather we find a different primary mentor for each student, it'd be best if every student had a backup mentor in-place from the start as well, but one person can be a contact point for many ideas. Ben, would you be OK with being a contact point for 3to2 as well? We'll figure out who's mentoring who once we see student apps and decide which ones we want mentored this year.

As a project maintainer I wouldn't want an intern being the most familiar person with our Py3 migration, I'd rather students stick with new features or optimization and coordinate the migration process as a group-wide effort.

Without help, it is going to take a long time to get many packages converted to 3.x. I think the students can be invaluable in this process. Ideally, they will tweak the 2.6 code until it converts cleanly using 2-to-3. That sort of work will be easy to maintain. IMO, this is the most important thing that can be done for Python at the moment. I would much rather this sort of work than having a student build a new library module and then not be around to maintain it. Raymond

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 7:23 PM, Daniel Fetchinson wrote:

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Hey guys/gals

Summer of Code is ramping up.  Every year the common complaint is that not enough Python core projects get proposed by students, and of course a big reason for that is often the only encouragement we offer prospective students is a link to the PEP index.

So let's make this year different.

Accepted students are paid a total of $4500 to work for roughly 30 hours a week, 12 weeks, on their proposed project.

The challenge is finding project ideas for them that could reasonably occupy them for the entire Summer and which the results of their work can be demonstrated.  They're being paid for specific projects so "Spend the Summer fixing bugs on the tracker" is a no-go, and Google has outlined that Summer of Code is about code, not documentation.

I've seen and heard that a lot of work is still needed on http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk both during the 3.1 release cycle, optimization possible all over the place.  It'd be great if those of you working closely with this can shout out some ideas, brainstorm a bit.

PSF was announced as one of the mentoring orgs today, this week before student applications are open is for students to talk to their prospective mentors and iron out the wrinkles in their plans, so there's not much time to get core project ideas together.

How about porting PIL to 3.0? There were many such requests on python-list and image-sig (including mine :))

I have ported it to the stage where its tests passes (which are far from covering all the code) and some of my own tests, there is a git repo on the image-sig that points to it. I wasn't really careful with some of the things (and I would even consider redoing some of them), but only one or two people got a copy of it so apparently people don't want/need it on python 3.0 just yet (not it alone at least).

Cheers, Daniel

-- Psss, psss, put it down! - http://www.cafepress.com/putitdown _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/ggpolo%40gmail.com

-- -- Guilherme H. Polo Goncalves

2009/3/18 Arc Riley :

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 6:13 PM, Brett Cannon wrote:

...

I would double-check Benjamin can do this since I don't think he will be 18 by the time GSoC starts. The FAQ at http://socghop.appspot.com/document/show/program/google/gsoc2009/faqs#mentor... seems to suggest it won't be an issue, but you never know.

Also be aware that a university student might not like being told what to do by someone in high school (although if they want $4500 they better).

This isn't a problem.  Drupal had a GHOP (SoC for highschool students) mentor who was too young to be a student (11 or 12 at the time), I believe Dmitri also served them as a SoC mentor, I know several SoC mentors are teenagers.

Excellent!

I'd rather we find a different primary mentor for each student, it'd be best if every student had a backup mentor in-place from the start as well, but one person can be a contact point for many ideas.

Ben, would you be OK with being a contact point for 3to2 as well?  We'll figure out who's mentoring who once we see student apps and decide which ones we want mentored this year.

Sure. -- Regards, Benjamin

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 7:53 PM, Terry Reedy wrote:

IDLE needs lots of attention -- more than any one experienced person is likely to have

I've actually heard this from several people, IDLE on Py3 etc Who would be a good person to mentor such a project?

Arc Riley wrote:

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 5:59 PM, Maciej Fijalkowski mailto:fijall@gmail.com> wrote:

I think we need to ask first guys who spend their live maintaining libraries instead of just proposing "let's make some poor student port it to py3k", but I might be just wrong, I don't know.

I agree. Part of Summer of Code is about getting students involved so they stick around, and heck my second SoC student is still with our project as the #2 committer, but he's an exception.

Also, we need the projects involved to want the tasks done by a student. As a project maintainer I wouldn't want an intern being the most familiar person with our Py3 migration, I'd rather students stick with new features or optimization and coordinate the migration process as a group-wide effort.

I added the 2to3 improvement idea to the list, a good start :-) We need a couple more at least.

If a 3to2 tool (for backporting Py3 code to Py2, so projects can develop primarily in Py3?) is something that's wanted, who would be a good mentor for it?

We also need projects for people who may want to do some coding and then just walk away - the SoC experience might teach them that programming isn't for them ;-) regards Steve -- Steve Holden +1 571 484 6266 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC http://www.holdenweb.com/ Want to know? Come to PyCon - soon! http://us.pycon.org/

Terry Reedy writes:

Some of the people who need to support both late 2.x and 3.x would prefer to write 3.x code and backport. The OP of a current python-list thread asked whether there was any way to write something like

@alias('__nonzero__') def __bool__(self): return True

How about simply: __nonzero__ = __bool__

I believe my own 3.0 code will mainly also need print() to print statement

If this is only about supporting "late 2.x" (i.e., 2.6 and upwards), you can already write: from __future__ import print_function

except e as a to 2.x version

Works in 2.6.

class C() to class C(object)

__metaclass__ = type Now I'm not saying that all 3.0 code will work in 2.6 with such simple precautions, far from it! Regards Antoine.

Feel free to email willg@bluesock.org or me with your ideas if the markup is difficult to work with. We've been on wiki duty all afternoon. description, any specific skills they'll need (special library, compiler theory, etc), what mentor should they talk to if they're interested. The markup complexity makes it much easier for students to navigate while including the info Google suggested. I'm hoping someone from the python web team will add the CSS class we need to greatly simplify it. On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 8:16 PM, Daniel (ajax) Diniz wrote:

Arc Riley wrote:

...

The process is as follows; we're compiling ideas for http://wiki.python.org/moin/SummerOfCode/2009 and getting mentors signed up at http://socghop.appspot.com/

Any chance that we can keep http://wiki.python.org/moin/SummerOfCode/2009 light on markup? I simply can't add a 'tidy struct and finish buffer interface/bytearray details' proposal as it is :/

Daniel

...

...

Summer of Code is ramping up. Every year the common complaint is that not enough Python core projects get proposed by students, and of course a big reason for that is often the only encouragement we offer prospective students is a link to the PEP index.

So let's make this year different.

Accepted students are paid a total of $4500 to work for roughly 30 hours a week, 12 weeks, on their proposed project.

The challenge is finding project ideas for them that could reasonably occupy them for the entire Summer and which the results of their work can be demonstrated. They're being paid for specific projects so "Spend the Summer fixing bugs on the tracker" is a no-go, and Google has outlined that Summer of Code is about code, not documentation.

I've seen and heard that a lot of work is still needed on http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk both during the 3.1 release cycle, optimization possible all over the place. It'd be great if those of you working closely with this can shout out some ideas, brainstorm a bit.

PSF was announced as one of the mentoring orgs today, this week before student applications are open is for students to talk to their prospective mentors and iron out the wrinkles in their plans, so there's not much time to get core project ideas together.

How about porting PIL to 3.0? There were many such requests on python-list and image-sig (including mine :))

I have ported it to the stage where its tests passes (which are far from covering all the code) and some of my own tests, there is a git repo on the image-sig that points to it. I wasn't really careful with some of the things (and I would even consider redoing some of them), but only one or two people got a copy of it so apparently people don't want/need it on python 3.0 just yet (not it alone at least).

I did a "git clone git://gpolo.ath.cx/pil-py3k.git" but it failed: gpolo.ath.cx[0: 189.7.18.241]: errno=Connection timed out fatal: unable to connect a socket (Connection timed out) fetch-pack from 'git://gpolo.ath.cx/pil-py3k.git' failed. By the way the reason I think few people checked it out is that people mostly are waiting for an "official" PIL release that is known to be stable. Did you try making your port part of the "official" PIL distribution? Cheers, Daniel -- Psss, psss, put it down! - http://www.cafepress.com/putitdown

...

...

...

...

Summer of Code is ramping up. Every year the common complaint is that not enough Python core projects get proposed by students, and of course a big reason for that is often the only encouragement we offer prospective students is a link to the PEP index.

So let's make this year different.

Accepted students are paid a total of $4500 to work for roughly 30 hours a week, 12 weeks, on their proposed project.

The challenge is finding project ideas for them that could reasonably occupy them for the entire Summer and which the results of their work can be demonstrated. They're being paid for specific projects so "Spend the Summer fixing bugs on the tracker" is a no-go, and Google has outlined that Summer of Code is about code, not documentation.

I've seen and heard that a lot of work is still needed on http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk both during the 3.1 release cycle, optimization possible all over the place. It'd be great if those of you working closely with this can shout out some ideas, brainstorm a bit.

PSF was announced as one of the mentoring orgs today, this week before student applications are open is for students to talk to their prospective mentors and iron out the wrinkles in their plans, so there's not much time to get core project ideas together.

How about porting PIL to 3.0? There were many such requests on python-list and image-sig (including mine :))

I have ported it to the stage where its tests passes (which are far from covering all the code) and some of my own tests, there is a git repo on the image-sig that points to it. I wasn't really careful with some of the things (and I would even consider redoing some of them), but only one or two people got a copy of it so apparently people don't want/need it on python 3.0 just yet (not it alone at least).

I did a "git clone git://gpolo.ath.cx/pil-py3k.git" but it failed:

gpolo.ath.cx[0: 189.7.18.241]: errno=Connection timed out fatal: unable to connect a socket (Connection timed out) fetch-pack from 'git://gpolo.ath.cx/pil-py3k.git' failed.

Thanks for noticing that, maybe more people had this same problem then, I will consider using github or some similar service (or maybe take the chance to bazaar, or mercurial, or svn, or..).

...

By the way the reason I think few people checked it out is that people mostly are waiting for an "official" PIL release that is known to be stable. Did you try making your port part of the "official" PIL distribution?

I have talked with Fredrik, he said he would be running it on another test suite to check how much of it really works. But, no, I didn't really try pushing it to be integrated into the next PIL release and it also wouldn't be possible without distributing a py3k version only -- I didn't do the port with the ability to work in python 3.x and python 2.x but this can be arranged.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you but I didn't mean to say that this version should work on both python 2.x and python 3.x. Ideally, there would be a PIL distribution for 2.x only and another one for 3.x only. The only thing is that people (myself included) will only be comfortable with the PIL for 3.x version if it comes with the blessings of Fredrik, i.e. if I were you I'd try pushing this with Fredrik. After all if all tests pass including the ones Fredrik has for himself, there should be no problem and I suppose he would be happy to have a PIL for python 3.x. Until then I'd be happy to check out your own port, whenever you have a working repository copy please let us know. Cheers, Daniel -- Psss, psss, put it down! - http://www.cafepress.com/putitdown

Terry Reedy wrote:

Antoine Pitrou wrote:

...

Terry Reedy writes:

...

Some of the people who need to support both late 2.x and 3.x would prefer to write 3.x code and backport. The OP of a current python-list thread asked whether there was any way to write something like

@alias('__nonzero__') def __bool__(self): return True

How about simply: __nonzero__ = __bool__

...

I believe my own 3.0 code will mainly also need print() to print statement

If this is only about supporting "late 2.x" (i.e., 2.6 and upwards), you can already write:

People often do not specify. I suspect some are thinking back to 2.5, but that will change in the future.

i am the author of the original post quoted above. i wrote a parser library (lepl) using 3.0. backporting to 2.6 was fairly easy, but it still does not run with 2.5. if i remember correctly it appeared that i was going to need separate source files because of significant differences in syntax (print, exceptions) as well as missing functionality (metaclasses, string formatting). andrew

Raymond Hettinger wrote:

Another thought: it would be nice is pydoc were built-out with an alternate html generator that emitted clean, simple html with the appropriate div/span tags so that CSS can be used to control formatting. Right now, all of the formatting and color coding is in-line. If you don't like the appearance of the output, the module is unusable. This is likely a two to three day project, easy and fun.

That makes it a much better candidate for GHOP that SoC, which requires projects with a little more meat on them. regards Steve -- Steve Holden +1 571 484 6266 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC http://www.holdenweb.com/ Want to know? Come to PyCon - soon! http://us.pycon.org/

Arc Riley wrote:

That makes it a much better candidate for GHOP that SoC, which requires projects with a little more meat on them.

Yes it does.

Though many organizations have taken to funding their own GHOPs. Perhaps this year PSF can use the SoC funds ($500/student) to host a bounty-sprint program much like GHOP?

IIRC, GHOP paid $100 per 3 tasks. With the economy in the tank this could attract a lot more than highschool students. Honestly I wish SoC was structured more like GHOP, it seemed much more effective and for the same funding could run year-round.

Or the same funds could be used to host various optimization competitions, replacement Py3 extension/type/function must match API and pass unit testing. Fastest solution wins (ie) $1000 and fame for the person or team that submitted it.

Something to keep in mind and for the PSF board to ponder for this Fall.

Why wait until Fall if it's a good idea? The summer vacation would surely be the ideal time for this, and that would mean we should start planning soon. Anyway, the first requirement would be some enthusiasm from the developer team for mobilizing such a potential source of assistance. regards Steve -- Steve Holden +1 571 484 6266 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC http://www.holdenweb.com/ Want to know? Come to PyCon - soon! http://us.pycon.org/

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 8:53 PM, Terry Reedy wrote:

IDLE needs lots of attention -- more than any one experienced person is likely to have

I'm willing to step up as a student for this but I still have to write a good proposal for it. My actual concern is about mentor availability, is someone around interested on being an IDLE mentor ? Regards, -- -- Guilherme H. Polo Goncalves

On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 5:39 PM, Terry Reedy wrote:

Guilherme Polo wrote:

...

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 8:53 PM, Terry Reedy wrote:

...

IDLE needs lots of attention -- more than any one experienced person is likely to have

I'm willing to step up as a student for this but I still have to write a good proposal for it. My actual concern is about mentor availability, is someone around interested on being an IDLE mentor ?

If I could, I would, and would have said so.  But I have only read about tk and have not actually used it.  If I did decide to dive into it, you'd be mentoring me ;-).  What I can and would do is give ideas for changes, read and comment on a proposal, and user test patched versions.

That is very nice Terry. Do you have some specific ideas that you want to share publicly (or in private) about IDLE ? Your expectations about what should be addressed first, or areas that should be improved.. you know, anything. The proposal I'm planning will include IDLE but it will also include some Tkinter, since it depends on it and bugs on the later can affect the former as you know. I was planning to first target the lack of tests of both IDLE and Tkinter, I believe that by adding tests (and doing it nicely) may change how future changes are applied (I'm thinking about having them getting new tests for new features, fixes, etc as it happens for other areas in Python) and will make easier to maintain them. My other target is to check the open tickets in the bug tracker regarding IDLE and Tkinter too, I have been much more active on the later so the former will take some more time to test/think/make a decision. I will be able to test these changes under Linux and on plain Windows XP, Vista and the 7 but differences between different system configurations may also affect IDLE, so any help you can provide will be very much appreciated. Hopefully someone with a mac will be able to provide some help here too.

Terry

-- -- Guilherme H. Polo Goncalves

I don't disagree, I just don't want to volunteer projects for something they don't want.

Right, there must be clear indication that they are willing to accept the work when it's done.

Note also that some of the largest Python-based projects, Django,

I have a working port of Django to Py3k, however, the Django authors are not interested in integrating it. The same could easily happen to other ports. I can accept that, and just wait a couple of years until they are ready. The GSoC student can't really wait that long. OTOH, it could be part of the student's application to get in contact with a potential mentor, and we could prioritize porting projects assuming the package authors indicate sufficient intent to accept the results of the porting. Regards, Martin

On 2009-03-23, Guilherme Polo wrote:

On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 5:39 PM, Terry Reedy wrote:

...

Guilherme Polo wrote:

...

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 8:53 PM, Terry Reedy wrote:

...

IDLE needs lots of attention -- more than any one experienced person is likely to have

I'm willing to step up as a student for this but I still have to write a good proposal for it. My actual concern is about mentor availability, is someone around interested on being an IDLE mentor ?

If I could, I would, and would have said so. But I have only read about tk and have not actually used it. If I did decide to dive into it, you'd be mentoring me ;-). What I can and would do is give ideas for changes, read and comment on a proposal, and user test patched versions.

That is very nice Terry. Do you have some specific ideas that you want to share publicly (or in private) about IDLE ? Your expectations about what should be addressed first, or areas that should be improved.. you know, anything.

I have one suggestion that I think might be widely appreciated: Add somewhere in the configuration dialog when users can enter a block of Python code to be executed at startup and whenever Restart Shell is executed. Use case: for people who use IDLE for calculations/experiments they might like to always have certain module imported. For me personally, it would be: import os import re import sys from math import * but of course the whole point is that people can write any code they like. (Some people might want to do various from __future__ imports in Python 2.6 to get various Python 3 features for example.) I know that you can use the -c option, but that only works at startup, not every time you Restart Shell. [snip] -- Mark Summerfield, Qtrac Ltd, www.qtrac.eu C++, Python, Qt, PyQt - training and consultancy "Rapid GUI Programming with Python and Qt" - ISBN 0132354187

On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 4:26 AM, Mark Summerfield wrote:

On 2009-03-23, Guilherme Polo wrote:

...

On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 5:39 PM, Terry Reedy wrote:

...

Guilherme Polo wrote:

...

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 8:53 PM, Terry Reedy wrote:

...

IDLE needs lots of attention -- more than any one experienced person is likely to have

I'm willing to step up as a student for this but I still have to write a good proposal for it. My actual concern is about mentor availability, is someone around interested on being an IDLE mentor ?

If I could, I would, and would have said so.  But I have only read about tk and have not actually used it.  If I did decide to dive into it, you'd be mentoring me ;-).  What I can and would do is give ideas for changes, read and comment on a proposal, and user test patched versions.

That is very nice Terry. Do you have some specific ideas that you want to share publicly (or in private) about IDLE ? Your expectations about what should be addressed first, or areas that should be improved.. you know, anything.

I have one suggestion that I think might be widely appreciated:

Add somewhere in the configuration dialog when users can enter a block of Python code to be executed at startup and whenever Restart Shell is executed.

Use case: for people who use IDLE for calculations/experiments they might like to always have certain module imported. For me personally, it would be:

   import os    import re    import sys    from math import *

but of course the whole point is that people can write any code they like. (Some people might want to do various from __future__ imports in Python 2.6 to get various Python 3 features for example.)

I know that you can use the -c option, but that only works at startup, not every time you Restart Shell.

Looks like a good suggestion to me, Mark. I would recommend adding it as a feature request on the typical place (bugs.python.org) because although I could just go and do it, I believe you are aware that new features in IDLE are subject to approval or disapproval by other members involved with IDLE. Hope you understand my position.

[snip]

-- Mark Summerfield, Qtrac Ltd, www.qtrac.eu    C++, Python, Qt, PyQt - training and consultancy        "Rapid GUI Programming with Python and Qt" - ISBN 0132354187

Regards, -- -- Guilherme H. Polo Goncalves