[Idle-dev] editor experiments

[Nicholas Riley]

On Sun, Jul 15, 2001 at 12:33:54AM -0400, Bruce Sherwood wrote:
> I repeat that the shell should be available to those who find it useful. 
> But I also emphasize that if you have only had the shell and a clunky 
> batch-style environment to compare and contrast, don't underestimate the 
> possibilities of doing exploration in a truly interactive editor window.

Certainly, a Smalltalk-like editor contextual menu where you could
select a code fragment and "print it" or "inspect it" - spawning a new
window in context - would make a lot of sense.  That's what I use the
shell for 99% of the time, anyway... but trying to import modules in
the shell and interact with them is really painful, especially when
you're changing the modules in question.  That's why the single-key
run of VPython's IDLE was really nice - you could create a new file
when you wanted to experiment, make some changes, hit the run key, and
see the output.  I especially liked the way only the new output was
visible, but the older output was also there if you wanted to scroll
up.

For a long time I've wanted to write an Inspector (again, like in
Smalltalk) for Python data types and objects - it'd certainly be
possible to write one with Tkinter and incorporate it into IDLE.  Only
reason I haven't is that I no longer use Python very much where I am
now.

-- 
Nicholas Riley <njriley@uiuc.edu> | <http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/njriley>