[Idle-dev] IDLE: Integrated Development and Learning Environment?

[Terry Reedy]

I propose that IDLE be renamed or at least viewed as a acronym for 
"Integrated Development and Learning Environment".  (See below for 
history.) The specific change would be to make the first line of 
idle.rst and derivatives read (something like) "IDLE is an Integrated 
Development and Learning Environment for Python, writen in Python with 
the tkinter GUI package."

Besides making 'IDLE' a proper acronym, this would better express what 
IDLE is meant to be, at least now.  A year ago, for instance, we added 
'Turtle Demo' to the IDLE menu for instructional, rather than program 
development purposes.

For another example, Mark and I hope to improve visualization of a 
program in action by adding a slowed-down run mode that highlights 
source lines (just as in manual mode now).  In other words, 
slideshow-like intelligent auto-stepping. https://bugs.python.org/issue25146
To me, this is as much for learning as for development of a specific 
program.  I think it would work well with Turtle demos and algorithm 
visualization demos.

The old version of README.txt (before the change a couple of days ago) 
starts "IDLE is Python's Tkinter-based Integrated DeveLopment 
Environment."  Note the capital 'L' in 'DeveLopement'.

help.txt and the derived idle.rst and help.html start "IDLE is the 
Python IDE built with the tkinter GUI toolkit.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy