[Tutor] Re: [Edu-sig] RE: [Idle-dev] IDLE's save-before-run r equirement

[Mark Hammond]

> I could be wrong about Scintilla not supporting this, but if it did,
> why would PythonWin not use it for *its* console?

Pythonwin does use scintilla for its console.  You are correct that it is
not integrated with the editor as tightly as IDLE.  This is mainly doe to
the fact pythonwin uses "... " as a secondary prompt, and also complications
with the scintilla lexer.

I agree that there would be significant work to get auto-indent and lexing
working correctly using scintilla as the console window.

As a "meta comment", over 12 months ago I added a feature to Pythonwin so
that new IDLE extensions could be used directly by both Pythonwin and IDLE.
In that time, not a single extra extension has been added (that I saw) and
IDLE changed its extension loading mechanism.

So while these things all sound good in theory, the reality is that people
need to actually _do_ it rather than speculate about how others could do it.
If we had a glut of new extensions being added to one environment and not
the other there would be a stronger case - but this simply isn't happening.
Witness the IDLE-fork project Guido mentioned - lots of talk, no action :(

Replying to Patrick's mail:

> What, if anything, can be
> done about this situation, or am I barking up the wrong tree?

You have 2 choices:  you can lobby for the various authors to make these
changes themselves, or you can submit patches to the authors.  I will let
you guess the most effective route :)  The commercial products may well do
it for "competitive advantage" reasons, or indeed they may _not_ do it for
exactly the same reasons!  The maintainers of the free software are likely
to be lacking any incentive, as their products generally work fine for them,
and probably have far more important things they could be doing (either for
free, or for their salary)

Mark.