On 18/05/13 03:16, bob gailer wrote:
On 5/16/2013 8:49 PM, Alan Gauld wrote:
don't run programs on real data using IDLE. IDLE is for developing programs not
running them.
That is really scary. Why do you say that? The IDLE documentation does NOT say
that!
IDLE is an IDE, that is, Integrated DEVELOPMENT Environment (emphasis added).
It is for development, not a general shell environment like your normal
operating system shell.
Like all IDEs, IDLE is one extra layer between your code and the machine
actually executing code:
Your Python source code
*** The IDE ***
The Python interpreter
The operating system
The hardware
IDLE does make some changes to the Python environment. In principle, none of the changes
should be detectable, or at least not meaningful, but sometimes they do have visible
effects. For instance, in my "vanilla" Python environment:
[steve@ando ~]$ python -E
Python 2.7.2 (default, May 18 2012, 18:25:10)
[GCC 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-52)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
print u"฿"
฿
while here is the same result in IDLE:
Python 2.7.2 (default, May 18 2012, 18:25:10)
[GCC 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-52)] on linux2
Type "copyright", "credits" or "license()" for more information.
print u"฿"
฿
Oops, IDLE has just played silly-buggers with the encoding of the
(pseudo-)terminal, and consequently has not printed the Unicode character
correctly.
Another example: if you raise SystemExit, the vanilla Python interpreter exits,
as it is supposed to. But IDLE merely prints a traceback, then continues
without exiting.
In a nutshell, while you *can* run code "live" in IDLE, as soon as you hit a
bug or mysterious behaviour, you should always try running it without IDLE and see if the
problem goes away.
--
Steven
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