interpreter improvements

[Chris Barker]

kevin parks wrote:
> Thanks everyone. I am learning a lot by this discussion, but i should
> point out that the main reason why i am so unhappy with the
> interpreter is that  i am ON A MACINTOSH!!! The forgotten platform of
> the python world. (thanks god for Jack and Just!)
> 
> which means that IDLE, we don't really have! (it's broken, i think and
> has been for a while as there are problems with tkinter. Unless i am,
> as always, wrong) And our Mac IDE is, uhm... (forgive me
> please)...uhmm.... Not fully-featured as IDLE is.

If you want improvements to the MacPython IDE, you need to request them
on teh macPython mailing list, or, even better, write them yourself! By
the way, there were some add ons available that added sytax highlighting
and some interpreter improvements to the MacPython IDE. They don't see
to ahve made it ino the main distribution (I don't know why not), but
ask on the mailing list, and I'm sure someone will be able to help you
find them.

> Compound this with the move to OS X and the fact that our text engine
> (WASTE) is not yet ready for prime time X wise...

You can run Unix Python on OS-X,and I'm pretty sure that someone has
been able to compile it eith readline support there. readline doesn't
give you all you want, but it's a start.
 
> Well. I guess i should be used to it by now and just realize that
> macintosh is the runt of the litter and that we will never have the
> niceties that other *nix and Windoze users have. I'll die of old age
> before we get syntax coloring!

The problem is that Python is an open-source project, so what gets
developed is what developers want. There may be more Mac users than
Linux users, for instance, but there are fewer developers, so there jsut
isn't as much done.

> just once, the Macintosh was given a bit more Python
> love.

I agree with this to some extent. For the most part, it is up to the
MacPython comunity to develop Mac specific tools, but there are places
where Python has been adapted to accomodate Windows and *nix, and not
the Mac. The example I can think of at the moement, is that the
interpreter can parse code with *nix or Windows line endings, but not
Mac ones. That's because it is easy to just ignore the \r in Windows
line endings, but it could have also been easy to ignore the \n and get
Mac + Windows compatability. Getting all three is hard, and no one seems
to want to do the work to get it.

Frankly, IO've also bee dissapointed in the MacPython communities
commitment to cross-platform tools. tkInter works on Windows well
because Window users have made sure that it does, ditto for wxPython,
etc. No one in MacPython development is working on those things. If you
had a strong tkinter, you'd have IDLE, if you had wxPython, you'd have
Boa, so the cross-platform tools really are the key. I guess if you
wanted to write programs for most computer users, you wouldn't be using
a Mac in the first place. :-(


-Chris



-- 
Christopher Barker,
Ph.D.                                                           
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