Comparing PythonWin and IDLE?

[Warren Postma]

On Win32 I have noticed the following two things about IDLE and PythonWin:

- When running a script with a lot of PRINT statements, IDLE is much nicer,
in that the output window is updated during the run of the program, whereas
the output window appears "frozen" and does not repaint in PythonWin until
program execution halts (program completes normally, or an exception
occurs). This makes IDLE more useable.

- PythonWin's Editor window is much faster and more crisp on my machine
(Pentium-II 400). I suspect this is because Tcl/Tk doesn't use native
widgets, and the Tcl/Tk editor widget is therefore somewhat more
'inefficient', in the name of greater portability.


Something I have noticed on BOTH IDLE and PythonWin, is that once a module
appears loaded into memory there is no "soft reset" feature in either one.
I used to use a language called CA-Realizer from Computer Associates. It was
an interpreter, and you could hit Ctrl-Z to restore the state of the
interpreter to what it was when it started up. That is, you could hit Ctrl-Z
instead of shutting down the IDE and restarting it. I find once a module has
been imported once, it often will not import again, even if I have changed
the source (.py) file, the .pyc file does not appear to be regenerated, and
any errors in the .py file can only be fixed by editing and saving the .py
file, quitting the IDE and restarting. This appears to happen for both IDLE
and Python. Anybody else seen this?


Warren Postma