On Sat, 19 Jul 2014 14:31:10 -0400, Terry Reedy wrote: > On 7/19/2014 3:28 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > >> So why does Python ship with IDLE? > > On Windows the Idle shell is needed for sensible interactive use.
One might say that *some* IDE is needed, but Idle itself isn't compulsory :-) It also depends on what you consider sensible. I haven't used Python on Windows much, but when I did use it, I found the standard Python interactive interpreter running under cmd.exe to be bare- bones but usable for testing short snippets. If I recall correctly, it is missing any sort of command history or line editing other than backspace, which I guess it would have been painful to use for extensive interactive work, but when I started using Python on Linux the interactive interpreter had no readline support either so it was just like old times :-) -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
