[Idle-dev] Totally Wacky Proposals / Feature Requests

[Guido van Rossum]

Glyph,

I'm currently severely under-resourced, and I can't spend as much time
as I would like to discuss your proposals.  I also won't ask for
clarifications since that would just add to my burden.  But I did read
your ideas.  There's some stuff I like, and some I don't.  Much of the
practical stuff (interrupting runaway programs etc) will happen.  The
debugger will become much better and you will be able to run the
program in slo-mo while watching variables.

Popping up a new editor when you type "def foo():" was tried in the
ABC environment that I built over 15 years ago; I didn't like it very
much.  What I do like is a feature of DrScheme, which has *two*
interactive buffers.  The top one contains the definitions you are
working on and can easily be saved.  Whenever you hit the "run"
button, a clean environment is started and this code is run.  You can
then experiment with its state in the second buffer, which is like
Python's interactive shell.  I guess this is a simplified form of the
notebook(s) you describe.

For some thoughts on where IDLE might go, see the TODO.txt file in the
IDLE 0.5 distribution (or in the Python 1.6a1 distribution, which
contains IDLE 0.6).

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)