[Idle-dev] IDLE interpreter window

[Martijn Faassen]

Fredrik Lundh wrote:
[snip]
> start by considering *why* you think that
> the editor version is harder to use.

This may be an implementation problem, but:
c is the cursor location
>>> c 
press backspace
>>>c
press space
>>> c
type expression:
>>> 1 + 1
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

Nasty problem.

> maybe there's some other design that makes
> even more sense, especially to people who've
> never seen a "shell" or an "editor" before.

A shell is a place where you give commands one by one, which are
executed one by one.

An editor is a place where you prepare a list of commands, which then
later can be run all at once.

A hybrid could be a seperate area where you can enter a list of commands,
which then with a simple command can be run at the same time. i.e:

--------------------
output/input history
--
input area
--------------------

What is confusing currently about Idle is that when you execute a program,
the shell window is used for output. But you don't see any 'history' then,
you just seem output appear out of the blue:

>>> 1 + 1
2
>>>
Hello world

Nicer would be something like:

>>> 1 + 1
2
>>> [run hello.py]
Hello world

Though I myself still have some questions with doing this at all; I'd like
to see my program output appear in some fresh window, and cleared each time
I execute the program.

Also a paned view would be nice here -- I want the output window to be
always there, in the location I want to. I don't want a new output window
to appear each time I run something. Emacs Python-mode is nice this way. 

A seperate issue is that Idle seems to remember old module states when I
run the same script again, with some code changed. Perhaps this is good if
you want to interact with your modules from the shell, but for me it got very
confusing.  Idle kept giving traceback containing errors which I already
had corrected in the sources! I ended up giving up and ran my program from
the command line instead.

Regards,

Martijn