Interactive question, change to help() in pydoc.py

[Donald 'Paddy' McCarthy]

Richard wrote:
 > Hello,
 >
 > I've decided to use python to teach programming basics because there
 >  seems to be great community surrounding python in education.
 >
 > Regarding the interactive interpreter, is it possible to put it into
 > a mode to allow multi-line input, with a "final" execution after the
 > last input line?  I'd like students to be able to type code
 > "fragments" into the interpreter without it executing each line.
 > Right now, I'm using:
 >
 >>>> if 1:
 > ...   print "hello, world!" ...   print "goodbye, cruel world!" ...
 >
 > However, I'm teaching people with zero programming / computing
 > experience, so I'd like to avoid the complication of explaining the
 > requisite indentation and the "if 1:" statement.
 >
Maybe using IDLE, or python win might help here, as small examples could
be typed, larger examples could be run from a file, and you could start
with a directory of pre written code snippets so they don't have to do 
too much typing.

Pad.