New guy question

[D-Man]

On Tue, Jun 12, 2001 at 10:07:31AM +0200, Alex Martelli wrote:
| "Chris Barker" <chrishbarker at home.net> wrote in message
| news:3B255439.DFD33F59 at home.net...
| > Glen Mettler wrote:
| > > I forgot to ask - what is the purpose of the Python window and the
| Python
| > > Shell window?
| > >
| > > Can I NOT run a series of scripts from these windows?  Must I go to the
| DOS
| > > window to check my program?
| >
| > You've gotten your answer, but I'll add one more comment. I mostly use
| > Linux, and run Python from a shell all the time. Windows does not give
| > you a decent shell by default, so you will be a lot happier using an
| > IDE, like IDLE or PythonWin (check out PythonWin, it's pretty nice).
| 
| Some of us old crufties actually stick with consoles, but I
| guess we're dinosaurs.  You're surely right that the default
| shell is sub-decent (on Win/95, /98, /ME; it's semi-decent on
| /NT & /2000), but...

Some dinosaurs aren't all that old ;-).  I don't think the shell on
NT/2000 is any better, except maybe the screen drawing is less buggy
(helps for bash, vim, less, man, mutt, etc.).

| > By the way, I havn't used windows much since 3.1, Does it really still
| > have all that "add it to your PATH in autoexec.bat" stuff? Isn't there
| > any kind of standard directories for executables, and some way to put a
| > symbolic link in for your application? It makes for a Much cleaner
| > system! (I suppose the above file association stuff is why they havn't
| > bothered)
| 
...
| 
| So, yeah, it IS a mess:-).

I use bash as my shell (cygwin is ESSENTIAL on any windows system
IMNSHO) and I have my own $HOME (not the one 'doze thinks it should
stuff my Start Menu, etc) where I base everything from.  My system is
kinda messy, but that's becuase '\' and ';' are special characters
that M$ had a sick urge one time to use for path separators.

-D