[Edu-sig] Python Briefing for Faculty

[Markus Gritsch]

> I'm putting together a 2-3 hour briefing + demonstration for faculty to
try
> to get them interested in Python for our introductory programming course,
> which uses a baffling subset of C++ at the moment.  I thought I'd do it in
> a PC lab with Win2000 and use Python 2.0 + IDLE.

Maybe you want to consider to have a look at SciTE:
http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html
SciTE is a Text Editor with many nice features like syntax highlighting for
many languages and filetypes (including Python), executing the Python-script
by pressing F5 which raises an output area, jump to tracebacks by pressing
F4, which makes hunting down errors very convenient.  The Python interpreter
is started in a separate process (very important for VPython programs).  It
is available on Win32 and Unix/Linux.  It supports .api files which give you
calltips for Python functions and classes which is also a very nice feature:
http://stud4.tuwien.ac.at/~e9326522/gen_python_api.zip
SciTE has support for multiple buffers and is quite configurable in any way.
I do all my Python development with SciTE and prefere it to IDLE.

Kind Regards,
Markus