Hello, Thnx, Projects & ?s TOC

[Isidor]

Hello Pythoneers-

I downloaded 1.5.2 a couple of weeks ago and have been having a
lot of fun with it ever since, um, that is to say, it has taken
over my brain and completely destroyed my capacity to do my work.
Though I have no formal training in CS, I have been dreaming up
software projects for quite a while, and I think I may actually
be able to tackle them with python. I am so excited about this
possibility that, as I mentioned above, it's hard for me to think
about anything else.

I have been scanning the comp.lang.python archives, and I am
amazed at how nice and helpful you all are. Cheers to you all!
You really are a good group of folks, and I hope that someday I
will be able to make a worthy contribution to the python world.

For now, I have some minor contributions to make, along with some
questions and ideas/comments. It's a fairly large tangle of
stuff, so I am going to break it up into separate messages, the
intent being to make it easier for people to find what is useful
for them and to enable question-answerers to address small chunks
of connected ideas rather than wade through a pile of other
stuff. I hope this is not a serious breach of news-group
etiquette.

Table of Contents (other messages):

1.   A Contribution:

     Tool for Newbz (& beyond?): ModuleWriter

          Extract import statements, function defs, and classes
          from a long and messy IDLE session and put them in a
          separate file sorted according to the order of their
          appearance in the original IDLE session.
     
2.   Another, more minor contribution:

     Win95(9x/NT?) file extension & association tricks

3.   A minor (and odd!) contribution:

     String2List.py

          Take a string that is written to *look* like a list
          "[['a', 'b'], '1', ['g', ['h', 'blah's "blah" blah']],
          '5']" but *isn't* a list, and turn it into a *real*
          list! Weird, huh?

4.   A very-minor contribution, and now start the questions:

     IDLE mini-hack & ?s

     a)   Inserting date/time-stamp at startup
     b)   ?: How to add commands to menus: details of an
          unsuccessful attempt
     c)   ?: How to execute a module (not import it) from within
          a python command shell (see problem workaround in
          "Win95 file extensions and associations tricks).

5.   Spreading the word about Python; ?s and ideas

     a)   MS-Office (i.e., vb-applications/word basic) macro-
          writers as a group of newbies who would eagerly &
          easily convert to python, with a little help.
     b)   Distribution of modules/packages on the big share/free-
          ware sites.


A question for this message:

I have noticed that not all the messages of this newsgroup are
archived in the python-list archives. (
http://www.python.org/pipermail/python-list/ ) Is this a known
discrepancy about which nothing can be done? (E.g., the only
messages archived are those that were sent to the mailinglist
while posts directly to the news group cannot be archived? I
don't think the evidence supports that interpretation, but I
don't recall right now.) Is this a problem with recent threads
and messages, i.e., a problem which gets resolved by the time of
a final monthly archive? (I have been looking almost exclusively
at the July archive, so I don’t know if this problem exists in
previous months' archives.)



Ok, thanks in advance for your help, and I hope my contributions
are of use to someone.

Take care

Isidor