IDLE won't launch, and other frustrations

[Michael A. Covington]

Greetings,


I'm trying to teach Python to some linguistics students who are new to
programming.  The last time I did this was 2 years ago, with Python 2.1 and
IDLE.  (Windows environment.)  At the time, everything went smoothly except
installation; as I recall Python 2.1 wrote its links into Administrator's
start menu instead of All Users' start menu, and I had to move them.  But
once moved, it worked well.

Fast forward to 2004.  Following Ron Zacharski's "Python for Linguists," I
choose ActiveState Python.  It installs very smoothly but, but the IDE,
which is called Pythonwin, is frustrating in two respects:

- If the program has a serious syntax error, you don't get any error
messages in the interaction window.  There is only a brief note in the
status line at the bottom of the screen.  This is *very* frustrating to my
students.

- In the IDE, input() and raw_input() pop up an input box.  On the console,
they simply wait for input.  The disparity is annoying to students who are
basically learning the console paradigm.  It becomes excessively hard to
write an interactive console program with the IDE.

So on my Windows XP laptop just now, I de-installed Python 2.1 and
ActiveState Python 2.3, and went and downloaded Python 2.3.3 from
www.python.org.

All looks good except - IDLE won't start at all!!!  I try to launch it, get
a few seconds of the hourglass cursor, and it's gone, with nothing on the
screen and no processes running!

Rebooting didn't cure this.  What gives?


-- 

Michael A. Covington - Artificial Intelligence Ctr - University of Georgia

"In the core C# language it is simply not possible to have an uninitialized
variable, a 'dangling' pointer, or an expression that indexes an array
beyond its bounds.  Whole categories of bugs that routinely plague C and C++
programs are thus eliminated."  - A. Hejlsberg, The C# Programming Language