Python and IDEs [was Re: Python 3 is killing Python]

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sat, 19 Jul 2014 14:31:10 -0400, Terry Reedy wrote:

> On 7/19/2014 3:28 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> 
>> So why does Python ship with IDLE?
> 
> On Windows the Idle shell is needed for sensible interactive use.

One might say that *some* IDE is needed, but Idle itself isn't 
compulsory :-)

It also depends on what you consider sensible.

I haven't used Python on Windows much, but when I did use it, I found the 
standard Python interactive interpreter running under cmd.exe to be bare-
bones but usable for testing short snippets. If I recall correctly, it is 
missing any sort of command history or line editing other than backspace, 
which I guess it would have been painful to use for extensive interactive 
work, but when I started using Python on Linux the interactive 
interpreter had no readline support either so it was just like old 
times :-)


-- 
Steven