[Edu-sig] comments on Idle and Python

[John M. Zelle]

I can't disagree with any of Toby's comments, but overall we like IDLE
very much here.

On a slightly more aggravating front, we and others have noticed that IDLE
1.04 is not as stable under Windows as previous versions. It seems that
there are situations that can cause the shell to lose communication with
its underlying subprocess. This happens sporadically, so it is a bit hard
to reproduce. However, if you simply run a program with an input (or
raw_input) function and then close the shell by clicking its close box
while it is waiting for input, it seems to leave the subprocess hanging
about 1/3 to 1/2 the time. The result is that the IDLE windows stop
updating/refreshing and cannot even be killed. One has to resort to the
task manager and kill the hanging processes.

I don't know if this is a problem in IDLE or an underlying TK issue, but
it happens enough to be annoying. Avoiding the close box seems to help,
but I'm not sure even that is a 100% solution. Anyway, I'm hoping that
IDLE 1.1 in Python 2.4 solves this problem. Bad defaults I can change;
random crashes are very discouraging to students.

--John


Toby Donaldson said:
> With this discussion about what editor to use for Python education, I
> thought I'd share some of the issues that have come up with Idle. I am
> curious if other people have the same or similar issues with Idle.  This
> is based on a  semester-long first-year university level programming
> course in Python, with about 200 people in my classes (about 400 overall).
>
> Overall, Idle was pretty good and we plan to use it again. But there are
> some confusing defaults that confused a number of students and made
> their first experiences a little more confusing than necessary.
>
>    - The File menu is confusing because the first choice is to open a
> "New Window". Is this a shell window or a file window? The difference
> between the shell and a file is not obvious to most beginners. Better
> would be "New File", or "Start New Python File" even.
>
>    - Syntax coloring only happens if you save your file as a '.py' file.
> Unfortunately, by default, Idle does *not* save new files as a .py
> files. Thus many students ending up files that run fine, but lack
> syntax-coloring. So, Idle should either save all files as .py by
> default, or syntax-coloring should be turned on by default.
>
>    - The default behavior when press F5 ('run') is to prompt you if you
> want to save a file. I have never seen anyone *not* want to save their
> file in this situation, so the more useful default would be to
> automatically save the file before it is run.
>
>    - There is no "..." when you enter  a multi-line shell command, e.g.
> Idle prints this
>
>       >>> for i in range(10):
>                    <--- cursor sits here blinking
>
>       The problem is that is nearly the same behavior as when you run a
> function that doesn't return (e.g. due to an infinite loop).
>       So it would be helpful if Idle set sys.ps2 to '...' by default.
>
> Toby
>
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-- 
John M. Zelle, Ph.D.
Professor of Computer Science
Wartburg College