[Python-Dev] Removing IDLE from the standard library (original) (raw)

Guilherme Polo ggpolo at gmail.com
Sun Jul 11 06:23:38 CEST 2010

2010/7/10 Miki Tebeka <miki.tebeka at gmail.com>:

Hello Tal,

I would like to propose removing IDLE from the standard library. -1. One of the biggest "selling points" for me when switching to python was the "out of the box" working IDE with REPL, syntax highliting and a debugger. The only other candidate I think of to replace IDLE might be IPython. However for novice users who are not used to command line it might be too intimidating. There are my others IDEs out there, some better some worse. However IMO to have one bundled with Python is highly important. Cross-platform support has degraded with the increasing popularity of OSX and 64-bit platforms. I use IDLE on Ubuntu 64bit and before that on OS X 64 bit, never had a problem. Can you give some examples on what do you mean by "cross-platform support"?

By "never had a problem" do you mean using some of the latest versions ? Here, running "idle" from a mac terminal and trying to type: print "hi" crashes when entering the quotation mark. I'm mostly sure this has been fixed on versions newer than 2.6.1 (but I hope you agree with me that shouldn't happen with a version distributed on macosx), so my another example is in the form of a question: how functional is the current IDLE debugger when running on a Mac ?

-- -- Guilherme H. Polo Goncalves

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