drop down feature

[John J. Lee]

"Greg Brunet" <gregbrunet at NOSPAMsempersoft.com> writes:
[...]
> And this is where, as disparagingly as people talk of VB, it does a good
> job.  Because it highly encourages (though can disable) static typing &
> checking, it is able to know what the properties, methods, etc. are for
> a variable.

Certainly true.

Remember, though:

>>> import sets
>>> s = sets.Set()
>>> dir(s)
['__and__', '__as_immutable__', '__as_temporarily_immutable__',
'__class__', '__cmp__', '__contains__', '__copy__', '__deepcopy__',
'__delattr__', '__doc__', '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattribute__',
'__getstate__', '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iand__', '__init__',
'__ior__', '__isub__', '__iter__', '__ixor__', '__le__', '__len__',
'__lt__', '__module__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__or__', '__reduce__',
'__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__setattr__', '__setstate__',
'__slots__', '__str__', '__sub__', '__xor__', '_binary_sanity_check',
'_compute_hash', '_data', '_repr', '_update', 'add', 'clear', 'copy',
'difference', 'difference_update', 'discard', 'intersection',
'intersection_update', 'issubset', 'issuperset', 'pop', 'remove',
'symmetric_difference', 'symmetric_difference_update', 'union',
'union_update', 'update']
>>> help(zip)

etc.


> Also agreed.  And one other thing that I've never seen matched (even the
> 1.0 version of .NET wasn't as good) is the dynamic debugger in VB6.
> When I've tried to debug code in IDLE or PythonWin or Boa, I frequently
> end up at layers deeper in the class hierarchy than I wish to go (I
> usually want to break at my code, but end up in some of the debugger
> support code & have to navigate my way up/over to do anything).  Also

If it doesn't annoy too many people (even if it does, actually), I'm
tempted to say 'Don't do that'.  Write unit tests (before the code, of
course), think harder rather than debug harder, and use print
statements instead.  Not that I don't fall into the same traps myself,
of course (and yes, debuggers can sometimes be useful)...

Mind you, maybe this *is* partly sour grapes from me -- I've never
really used a debugger / IDE like the one you describe, and as you
say, editor (rather than interpreter) auto-completion is at least very
hard to implement for Python.


John