'Intellisense' possible for Python?

[Greg Brunet]

"Cameron Laird" <claird at lairds.com> wrote in message
news:v03r225h81gu47 at corp.supernews.com...

> >While I'm likely not thinking very Pythonic-ly yet, I don't see this
as
> >something that goes against that.  Rather, it's simply an aid to
> >learning and documenting the functions, classes, etc. and making it
> >easier to look them up than to jump over to separate documentation
files
> >(which also have the disadvantage of getting out of sync with the
actual
> >code!).
> .
> .
> .
> The fragment about solecisms expands this way:  you
> are right.  When a coder makes many common errors--
> mispellings and such--VB and many other languages
> catch those at compile time, while Python and many
> languages like Python catch them only during exe-
> cution.  Earlier is better.
.
.
.
> Your other points and questions are also apt.  I
> was far too abbreviated.  Intellisense in fact
> bundles several different aspects, and they
> deserve individual attention.  For now, I'll just
> recommend <URL: http://
> www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-pyint.html >
> and the references that appear in <URL: http://
> phaseit.net/claird/comp.lang.python/doctest.html >.
>


Thanks again for your responses.  While I have probably grown (overly)
dependant things like Intellisense, and "Option Strict"/"Option
Explicit" (which require variable declaration & explicit type
cast/conversion for all but the most basic type changes in VB),  I don't
regard them as bad things, but I can see how I might ignore even better
practices (writing unit tests first, etc.) by depending too much on
these.  I have followed the links that you provided here & in another
post and I can see that there's a considerable group of tools available
to aid in improving my development practices.

The place that I guess that I'm left at is whether it's really feasible
to do an 'Intellisense' type of function in a Python IDE.  The dynamic
nature of Python obviously makes this very difficult to do correctly.
Unless optional static typing is implemented: see
http://www.python.org/~guido/static-typing/static-typing.ppt and
http://www.python.org/~guido/Proposal.txt or
http://www.python.org/~guido/Proposal.doc, the best stab at it will
require like the real-time analysis that WingIDE.  Obviously some
(optional) declaration would make things much easier.

So I guess the remaining question is, what's the status of (optional)
static typing in Python.  Other than the articles I've mentioned, I
don't see any other comments regarding its resolution (has it been
rejected, put on hold or what?)  Thanks,

--
Greg