extend methods of decimal module

[Mark H. Harris]

On Saturday, March 1, 2014 12:55:07 AM UTC-6, Anssi Saari wrote:
> I recently watched a presentation by Jessica McKellar of PSF about what
> Python needs to stay popular. Other than the obvious bits (difficulties
> of limited support of Python on major platforms like Windows and mobile)
> the slight lack of perfection in IDLE was mentioned. Specifically the
> old blog post titled "The Things I Hate About IDLE That I Wish Someone
> Would Fix" at

> http://inventwithpython.com/blog/2011/11/29/the-things-i-hate-about-idle-that-i-wish-someone-would-fix/

hi Anssi,  this discussion really doesn't belong in this thread, but I'll give you my two cents
on it anyway, just because I put the random comment in here to begin with.

The blog link which you posted is quite old, and yes, as I remember back to the 2009-2011 time
frame IDLE had some problems with stability and some other issues related to tkinter. My experience 
with IDLE today is one of stability usefulness; clean and simple.

Like that FORD commercial here in the States, " Have you driven and IDLE lately?"

Some of the bloggers 'hates' are actually features of IDLE and we really don't want to change them. Some of them have been fixed. Some of them are annoyances not with IDLE per se, but with tcl/tk 
and are a tkinter thing. For instance, the blogger 'hates' the menu tear-off feature. I love it. All of my 
tcl/tk apps have tear-off menus; its totally a tkinter thing and if you're not used to apps written with
the tk library then this 'feature' may annoy you.

The IDLE concept was to have an IDE written in pure python that would use the tk library. If you've not written any code using the tk library then try it. GUI apps can be built with the tk library (with either tcl, or with python, and others) that are reduced to a few lines of code vs. many pages of code. In two pages of tk coding I can create a GUI app that would use 16 pages of code written in C, and 8-16 pages of code written in C++ or Java. The down-side to the tk library is that the GUI work they do for you under
the covers (which is extensive by the way) makes some assumptions and simplifies the options. So, 
you trade off the speed and efficiency of writing the app and getting it to market quickly, with not 
having the explicit control over the GUI that you might have if you had written the code to Q, or GTK,
or some such.

Producing IDLE using tk was genius on the part of Guido initially. The tradition has been kept up, but
has not received the priority that other python issues have received. By the way, there are other  python
IDEs out there (I don't use them, just pointing out that they are available). 

IDLE is free, its efficient, and for the moment its also very stable and highly useful. If you have not
driven an IDLE lately, give it a try. Also, my experience with the devs on IDLE (and particularly Terry Reedy) is that they have been very responsive, helpful, even courteous and professional. So, I think the
blogger was a little too harsh. 

Cheers