> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Nate Lowrie
> 
> On Windows, if you don't want a heavyweight editor like SPE, 
> check out Crimson Editor.  Not nearly as good as TextMate but 
> one of the best lightweight editors for windows.

I work in windows and use PythonWin.  It is fairly lightweight and has
an integrated debugger.  

In Linux I use Gedit/vim/gvim and the command line.

You also are going to want to learn Subversion and doctest.

> 
> On every editor, make sure that you DO NOT use spaces instead 
> of Tabs and that you are not converting spaces to Tabs on 
> opening.  That will screw you up so bad and it's a major 
> source of frustration for beginners.

This is too strongly put.  Spaces are in fact more poular than tabs
among Pyhon programmers: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/. I
don't know why and don't want to argue about it.  I think that the most
important lesson for new users is to _be_ _consistent_.  If you will be
working mainly with Dabo, that probably means using tabs.  Note that
PythonWin will default to the indentation method already present in any
file you open.

> 
> Debuggers are not really all that nessecary given Python is 
> an interpretted language.  Also, in the case of Dabo you can 
> bring up a command window and do an interactive debugging 
> session as your program is running.  It is a very powerful feature.

I'm not sure what you mean by this.  Don't you have to restart the gui
after each edit?  Print statements and liberal modularization/running
from command line seem to work well for me.  Debugging GUI's is harder
in python than in VB/VFP, mainly because in those the debugger is
integrated with the GUI. 

One piece of advice: Think about printing attributes of your
controls/widgets.  It can even be helpful to print the widget itself.
Often I find that my widget is not the type I thought it was.

> 
> I have never programming in VFP so I cannot recommend a 
> course of actions for learning python other than to begin 
> coding and lookup the syntax for various things when you need 
> them.  That is how I learned to code in Python.

This is very true, and how I learned (coming from VB).  Plus I resolved
never to write another new app in VB, but I had that luxury.  And
remember that to do anything remotely fancy, there is often a module out
there.  Plan to browse the Global Module Index a lot.  Get to know the
layout of the python docs.  Dig into the python code of the modules you
import.

Robert


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