On Sat, Oct 7, 2017 at 4:55 AM, Marko Rauhamaa <ma...@pacujo.net> wrote: > Personally, I think stdin is a bit lame as a stimulus source for an > interactive program. That's not even what stdin is primarily meant for; > stdin is meant to be the input data for a job. Similarly, stdout is > meant to be the result of the computation. Stderr, then, is used to > deliver optional diagnostic messages, ie, metainfo about the > computation. > > For interaction with a human, you should look into frameworks like Qt or > curses.
Qt is *massive* overkill for a lot of programs. Even curses is more than you'd normally need. Stick to readline and have done with it. Challenge: Take a reasonably competent computer programmer who's never written a single line of Python code, and teach him/her how to use Python in one working week (Mon-Fri). Your student must work mostly solo, and you may meet with him/her once per day for one hour. At 5PM on Friday, your student must demonstrate a fully-working project written in Python; it must have some form of user interaction and perform some kind of useful or semi-useful task. Are you going to recommend that s/he master Qt as well as the Python language itself? And if you say "this task is impossible", that's fine. I'll have to rewrite my history and erase the eighteen or twenty (I think) students of mine that have done exactly that. A number of them used Flask to create a web application (since they already had experience with web app development using Node.js prior to this one-week challenge), one did data analysis with output in matplotlib, and the rest all used nothing but the console. Recently, I had three (out of seven) students building adventure games, and they all had distinct styles and dramatically different code models, but all of them followed a basic "read from stdin, write to stdout" model. Their UIs literally consisted of just input() and print() calls, letting them all concentrate on the guts of the code. Standard streams exist for a reason. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
