On 12/16/2017 8:26 AM, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
Unfortunately, Python's indentation mechanism makes the REPL too frustrating an environment to type in even the simplest of function definitions, let alone a whole class.
The fundamental problem is that most REPLs are for 'command lines', and Python does not have 'command lines'. It has statements. A statement may consist of a single line, and if simple, it looks and acts like a command line. But a statement may also be multiple lines. Even without indentation, a single-line editing and history mechanism is a poor fit to a multiline statement language.
IDLE has a shell built for Python and Python only. One enters, edits, and retrieves complete statements. Indentation is automatic. There is currently a glitch in that Shell indents with tabs instead of spaces, but I want to change that and know of two ways to do so.
-- Terry Jan Reedy -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
