drop down feature

[Michael Peuser]

Hi Greg,

I fully agree with your very comprehensive statements. I personally do not
know VB so much but RealBasic for Macintosh which is absolutely in the line
of useability. It is as well a very friendly GUI Builder with all
drag-n-drop and multimedia stuff AND it compiles AND it makes self contained
exe files!!

This in fact is my wishlist for a Python IDE .....

Of course the *language* itself is mess ;-)

I have the impression, that Wing IDE Standard Edition *could* have somthing
in it, but not the "lite" version. I also like Active States KOMODO , but
the professional version costs some hundred bucks as well. This is not
acceptable. It's much too less for the money.....

Kindly
Michael P

"Greg Brunet" <gregbrunet at NOSPAMsempersoft.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:vjiu1aeknt8hd2 at corp.supernews.com...
> Hi Michael:
>
> "Michael Peuser" <mpeuser at web.de> wrote in message
> news:bhbp0k$epd$07$1 at news.t-online.com...

> > IDLE can help with its Class Browser feature. Although this not
> > "automatic",  it will help a lot
> > when using site-packages or even your own old code ;-)

> IDLE and many other GUI's do provide that & it is a definite help.  Any
> class library, whether Python's or some other language, simply has to be
> learned.  Hopefully, the designers were consistent and 'standard' in
> their name choices to make things easier, and certainly once you begin
> using a tool frequently it becomes easier.  Even as good as a class
> browser is, I've found that the Intellisense stuff is perhaps an order
> of magnitude more helpful to me than the browser.  Without having to
> manually jump to another window/pane & lookup the class I'm interested
> in, I have all of the properties & methods available as I finish typing
> the variable, AND a link to the full help on the item by pressing F1 as
> soon as I've selected it.
>
> > For the beginner, of course even properties (attributes and methods)
> > of standard types are not
> > obvious. I must say, that Python can really be a little bit cryptical
> > (consider *get* oder *has_key* for
> > directories ). I generally have to look it up, when *haskey* or *has*
> > does not work ;-)
> >
> > But you can very well organize yourself with man pages....
> >
> > The main problem seems to be that Python has no static typing. So it
> > *generally* is not possible
> > for an editor to know what type will dynamically be used.

> And this is where, as disparagingly as people talk of VB, it does a good
> job.  Because it highly encourages (though can disable) static typing &
> checking, it is able to know what the properties, methods, etc. are for
> a variable.  In reading a description of the WingIDE for Python, their
> standard package tries to accomplish this by: "Infers class structure
> and variable types based on real time analysis of Python source code."
> I understand that Python for now & likely evermore will be dynamically
> typed - hopefully the editors can get smarter about performing this
> analysis to support the intellisense type operation.

> > Problems increase especially with GUIs - I would be lost even in
> > Tkinter without a paper reference  ;-)

> Also agreed.  And one other thing that I've never seen matched (even the
> 1.0 version of .NET wasn't as good) is the dynamic debugger in VB6.
> When I've tried to debug code in IDLE or PythonWin or Boa, I frequently
> end up at layers deeper in the class hierarchy than I wish to go (I
> usually want to break at my code, but end up in some of the debugger
> support code & have to navigate my way up/over to do anything).  Also
> the VB debugger would provide mouse-over information of any variables
> (their value, etc.) displayed in the editor at the time the breakpoint
> fires, along with an unbelievable ability to edit and continue running
> the program.  If someone could come up with an editor for Python with
> the capabilities of the VB6 IDE, I'd certainly pay for that one.  For
> now, it seems that Boa is the closest thing to the mark in the open
> source field.  I've not evaluated the commercial editors sufficiently,
> but from what I've read, there isn't anything out there yet that meets
> that criteria.

> > Kindly
> > Michael Peuser
>
> Take care,
>
> --
> Greg
>