On 13/05/2021 22:32, Terry Reedy wrote:
>> Great news, that will eliminate a whole category of problems
>> we see on the tutor list with IDLE.
>
> Could you summarize your experience here with a post on
> "Beginner problems with IDLE"?
Without trawling through the archives I can't be scientific,
however, here are my anecdotal memories...and in no
particular order:
1) The indentation issues being addressed in the current change
2) The inability to paste code from web sites into IDLE (you
have to do it one line at a time and wait for the
interspersed results. This is, of course, due to the
interpreter in the shell, not really an IDLE issue but
complete beginners don't understand that.
3) The inability to save an interactive session then
reload/replay it. This is more interesting. The old VAX
debugger used to be able to do that by simply prefixing
everything with a comment marker when saving and then
interpreting lines beginning with comment+prompt (#DBG>)
on reload. Something similar could probably be done in
IDLE although multi-line commands make it more tricky..
4) The ability to copy/paste code (without the prompts)
into a file (either a project or a web post/email request)
while retaining formatting. There are other Python IDEs
that already offer this (PyCharm is one such, I believe)
5) Tabbed edit windows (already in IdleX).
6) How to pass command line arguments when running a program.
(Yes, it's possible, but not intuitive to a beginner,
but much better than before)
As for suggestions/solutions from the tutor list members
they tend to be:
1) Danny Yoo's excellent but ancient tutorial (from Python
2 days?)
https://www.hashcollision.org/hkn/python/idle_intro/
2) The IDLE page on python.org
https://docs.python.org/3/library/idle.html
3) The IDLE help page
4) Any of several videos on YouTube.
5) This list...
6) Stop using IDLE, use <IDE of choice> instead.
PyCharm or MS Code being the current favourites.
7) Switch to IdleX instead... (My personal solution
of choice for most things ;-)
In about that order of popularity.
--
Alan G
Author of the Learn to Program web site
http://www.alan-g.me.uk/
http://www.amazon.com/author/alan_gauld
Follow my photo-blog on Flickr at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/alangauldphotos
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