Steven D'Aprano <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Even if you're stuck on some god-forsaken Windows PC with just Notepad, > you can still read Python code. > > Now, *writing* Python code with Notepad isn't as easy, but it is still > doable. How about Lisp code?
I've generally used IDLE when editing Python under Windows. It comes with the Python distro after all. Yes, very large systems have been developed with much worse editing facilities than Notepad. Specifically, through the whole 1960's and early 1970's, display terminals were a rarity and people usually edited code (whether in Lisp or another language) on printing terminals (usually noisy Teletypes). It gets worse than that. In the very early days (the Lisp terms "car" and "cdr" are derived from names of registers of the ancient IBM 709 mainframes) they used punch card systems instead of printing terminals. It gets worse than THAT. One of the important historical Lisp applications was James R. Slagle's SAINT symbolic integration program on the IBM 704. Written on punched cards. Except Slagle sadly became blind while writing this program, so he did a fair amount of the development by feeling the holes in the cards with his fingers to read them. I don't think anyone writes Python that way ;-). > The day has not yet arrived that nobody ever needs to edit code in a > plain, vanilla text editor. It's not impossible or terribly difficult to write Lisp that way, it's just unpleasant, once you've gotten used to doing it with editors that automatically indent and balance parens. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list