[Edu-sig] Announcement: Visual

[David Scherer]

> Interesting, same approach as Arthur Siegel's for PyGeo i.e.
> customize an IDLE for a front end.

We are customizing IDLE because we need features that the "official" IDLE
will probably have someday, but we can't wait.

It's our hope that eventually either our changes or equivalent functionality
will find their way into the official IDLE, and we can distribute the
"standard" version.  However, edu-sig isn't the right place to discuss this.

> This idea of uninstalling a current Python in order to run
> a Python-based application doesn't sit well with me.

As I said in my announcement, this is an alpha release of an installer
targeted at students in Matter & Interactions, the vast majority of whom
will not already have Python.  It's also a concrete proposal for how Python
might be distributed to educational audiences.

This is highly relevant to "Python in Education" - right now just the
process of installing and supporting Python, Tcl/Tk, a late version of IDLE,
Numeric, other libraries you happen to need, and your course materials, on
30 computers in a school lab is painful enough to discourage someone from
using Python.

> Seems a custom IDLE should/could
> roll forward (and go in its own directory, so I wouldn't have
> to touch the working generic IDLE).

All of the individual components of the Visual distribution could be, and
eventually will be, distributed separately.  However, I haven't yet had time
to package them that way, and I assure you that it would take you much more
time to install all of them separately than to replace your 1.5.2
distribution with ours; and in the end you would probably have exactly the
same things on your disk.

I suggest you try it - you will probably find it an improvement, and it
should be a perfectly good superset of a stock 1.5.2 installation.  If you
find a way in which it isn't, I would appreciate the bug report!  If you are
worried about keeping the old version of IDLE, make a copy of your
Tools\IDLE directory; it will work fine.

Dave