[Tutor] Python Versions

[Alan Gauld]

"earlylight publishing" <earlylightpublishing at yahoo.com> wrote

> Actually the first thing I noticed is the author would say something
> like "you can run the program by pressing F5

Ah! Yes that would cause problems.
He obviously does intend you to use an Edit window rather than a
shell in that case. A great pity because every Pythonista should
learn how to use the shell,its one of Pythons most powerful tools.

> Do people really write whole applications just using the shell?

Only very occasionally, if its a short application that will only
be used once. For example I recently wrote a program to do
some bulk changes to my photo collection(renaming, moving,
creating new folders etc) and just typed it into the shell.

But OTOH it would be very unusual for me to write any signficant
sized application without using the shell to help me assemble
the application - trying out code snippets, using help(), testing and
debugging modules etc. Its very much an intrinsic part of my
development methodology with Python and I miss it greatly when
I have to revert to other languages.

-- 
Alan Gauld
Author of the Learn to Program web site
http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld