A python IDE for teaching that supports cyrillic i/o

Kirill Simonov xi at gamma.dn.ua
Sun Nov 19 08:58:19 EST 2006


On Sun, Nov 19, 2006 at 12:33:39PM +0100, Alan Franzoni wrote:
> Kirill Simonov  si è divertito a scrivere:
> 
> > Unfortunately, most IDEs I tried failed miserably in this respect.  My
> > test was simple: I've run the code
> >     name = raw_input("What's your name? ")  # written in Russian
> >     print "Hello, %s!" % name               # in Russian as well
> > both from the shell and as a standalone script. This either caused a
> > UnicodeError or just printed invalid characters.
> 
> I highly dislike asking stupid questions, and this might be stupid
> indeed... but did you write
> 
> # -*- coding: iso-8859-5 -*-
> 
> or
> 
> # -*- coding: koi8_r -*-
> 
> (they both seem suited to the Russian language, but I don't know the
> difference)

They are different encodings for the same character set. The latter is
mostly used under Unices, and the former is not used anywhere as far as
I know. There are two more cyrillic encodings: cp866 and cp1251 - for
DOS and Windows correspondingly.
 
> as the first line in your .py file?

No, I would prefer the editor to save the .py files with non-ASCII
characters in UTF-8 encoding adding the BOM at the beginning of the
file. This will allow the interpreted to detect the file encoding
correctly and would save a teacher from explaining what an encoding is
and why it is needed.

> Personally, I use Eclipse+Pydev (a bit steep to learn at the beginning, and
> quite memory and cpu hogging since it's a java-based ide; don't use it on
> old/slow computers with less than 512MB RAM, and don't use version < 3.2
> either) and it uses that very line to recognize the actual character set
> employed. You may check with other encodings as well.

Unfortunately, the Eclipse CPU/memory requirements are extremely high
for a high school, so I haven't even tried it.


-- 
xi



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