On Tue, Oct 25, 2016 at 2:55 PM, Chris Barker
But that's something of a solved problem. IPython offers a rich interactive environment, for people who find the limitations of the standard interactive prompt frustrating. Would it be worth the standard Python documentation promoting IPython for that role?
+1 iPython really makes it easier to do exploratory code -- I have my students install it day one of an intro to python class.
However, maybe ironically, iPython is still a bit ugly for editing multi-line constructs -- maybe it will get better.
I'm sure it could be improved more, but since the 5.0 release IPython has been *way* better at editing multi-line constructs than the built-in REPL is. For example, if I type: In [1]: def f(): ...: return 1 ...: In [2]: and then press up-arrow once, it gives me the complete function body back and lets me move around and edit it. Incidentally, PyPy's built-in REPL handles multi-line constructs like IPython does, rather than like how the CPython built-in REPL does. There are a lot of logistic issues that would need to be dealt with before CPython could consider making a third-party REPL the default or anything like it... it looks like IPython's dependency tree is all pure-Python, which makes it more viable, but it's still a lot of code and on a very different development cycle than CPython. bpython appears to depend on greenlet, which is a whole other issue... OTOH it seems a little quixotic to spend lots of resources improving the built-in REPL when there are much better ones with vibrant developer communities. -n -- Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org