[Tutor] Saving session in IDLE

[alan.gauld@bt.com]

One of my tutor 'students' has asked me an interesting 
question.

How do you Save Session in IDLE?

You can save your current shell window as a text file
and edit it to remove '>>> ' plus output lines etc. 
But that's messy.

It would indeed be convenient to save an entire 
interactive session such that you could resume later 
where you left off.

Two approaches seem feasible:
1) The good way - save the internal state - builtins dir 
   and all imports etc but this sounds like it's a lot easier
   to say/write than to do!

2) The dirty approach - save the session window then 
on strip out extraneous lines. This becomes harder if 
the lines are continuations using '\' but otherwise 
should be possible. The resultant file can then be 
imported and the previous session replayed. There's 
a snag if the previous session had faults - and 
which interactive session doesn't - you stop at the 
faulty line. yuck...

Looks like we're back to option 1....

Or does anyone know of a way of doing this already?

Alan g.
Author of the 'Learning to Program' web site
http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld