[Python-ideas] Have REPL print less by default

[Terry Reedy]

On 4/19/2016 10:03 AM, Michael Selik wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 5:36 AM Franklin? Lee
> <leewangzhong+python at gmail.com
> <mailto:leewangzhong%2Bpython at gmail.com>>
> wrote:
>
>     On Apr 19, 2016 4:09 AM, "Paul Moore"
>     <p.f.moore at gmail.com
>     <mailto:p.f.moore at gmail.com>> wrote:
>     > Basic users should probably be using a tool like IDLE, which has a bit
>     > more support for beginners than the raw REPL.
>
>     My college had CS students SSH into the department's Linux server to
>     compile and run their code, and many teachers don't believe that
>     students should start with fancy IDE featues like, er, syntax
>     highlighting.
>
> That's probably because your professors thought you were more advanced
> than other new Pythonistas, because you were CS students. If I were in
> their shoes, I might chose a different approach depending on the level
> of the course.
>
>> But that doesn't answer my question: would the proposed change hurt
> your workflow?
>
> It might. Would it affect doctests? Would it make indirect infinite
> recursion more difficult to trace? Would it make me remember yet another
> command line option or REPL option to turn on complete reprs? Would it
> force me to explain yet another config setting to new programmers?
>
> I think a beginner understands when they've printed something too big. I
> see this happen frequently. They laugh, shake their heads, and retype
> whatever they need to.
>
> If they're using IDLE, they say, "OMG I crashed it!" then they close the
> window or restart IDLE.

Recursion limit tracebacks with 2000 short lines (under 80 chars) are 
not a problem for tk's Text widget.  Long lines, from printing something 
line 'a'*10000 or [1]*5000 make the widget sluggish. Too many or too 
long may require a restart.

> I'd say it's more a problem in IDLE than in the default REPL.

Its a problem with using an underlying text widget optimized for 
managing 'sensible' length '\n' delimited lines.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy