Re: IDLE in UK Schools

On 8/5/2015 3:11 PM, Al Sweigart wrote:
> To be clear, I don't want to fork IDLE.

Even if you ever do, it would be better to wait until we do the 90+% we 
agree on ;-)

> I meant "pastebin" as in the generic sense,

I did not know it had become generic;-).

> But the idea here is to
> make it easy to share code without getting the whitespace mangled.

This is the key point.  I have recently received code stripped of 
spaces.  I expect this for tabs, but not spaces.

> If changing Python's error messages isn't a problem,

There are intentionally not part of the API, but we do not change them 
in bugfix releases.  For new versions, code depending of exact wording 
should have tests that fail, and that are run before x.y.0 is released.

In the issue I linked, Raymond pointed out a harder issue with adding a 
data argument.  There are millions of IndexError() calls in Python and C 
code.  What happens to those if an arg is added?  This is typical of the 
opposing forces of improvement and compatibility.  I can think of 
solutions, but they are not pretty.  I am not wasting my energy on this one.

> By "real time lint", I
> meant a feature that could point out syntax errors and variable name
> typos, rather than code style.

For the benefit of interactive mode, compile() can check partial 
statements (at the end of a line).  Idle shell used this also.  If might 
be feasible to use the same, at least somewhat, in the editor.  This 
would be an interesting challenge.

Name typo checking is impossible with 'import *', which is why I want to 
convert 'from tkinter import *' to 'from tkinter import x, y, z'.
Using name completion helps with names in imported modules.  I used 
extension config to shorten the delay time.

> Thanks for your patches and hard work, Terry. I've filed a bug for the
> "detect disk changes" feature: https://bugs.python.org/issue24799

Since you did not add terry.reedy as nosy, it did not make my list 
before posting.  I would have seen it anyway, tomorrow, when the new 
issues list is posted (every Friday).  Please don't mark security patch 
only versions, 3.2 and 3.3.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy