A couple of (minor) things I'd like to see in the Python _environment_

[Skip Montanaro]

    chris> * A command line driven documentation browsing system, similar to 
    chris>  'perldoc' in the Perl world.  (Python's entities have doc
    chris>  strings - maybe those could be leveraged?)

A weak substitute perhaps, but in my .pythonrc file I define the following
help function:

    def help(x):
	"""display an object's __doc__ attribute if it has one"""
	if hasattr(x, "__doc__") and x.__doc__ is not None:
	    print x.__doc__
	else:
	    print "no docstring available"

    chris> * An interactive debugger invokable with a command line option to
    chris>   the Python interpreter. - I know about PDB, and it does in fact
    chris>   work, but oh how I miss the ability to simply do:

I'm mostly a print kind of guy, but I seem to recall that IDLE has some
debugging builtin.  Others have worked on debugging both Python and the
underlying C code.  Someone released some gdb magic awhile ago.  You might
search deja.com for it.

Skip Montanaro | http://www.mojam.com/
skip at mojam.com | http://www.musi-cal.com/
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