[Boa Constr] Boa's new handling of stdin in ShellEditor

[Patrick K. O'B. <po...@or...>]

Riaan,

This is probably pretty nitpicky, but I'm not crazy about the new way that
stdin works in the Shell for three reasons. First, the behavior isn't the
same as other IDEs, such as IDLE. Second, the additional prompt is a
distraction when most programs that use stdin already display a prompt.
Third, it is too easy to move the cursor back to a previous command and copy
that line down which displays the ps1 prompt instead of ps4, etc. For
examples of what I mean you can type help() or license().

Now, I tried to change this in Boa so that it was still "inline" as opposed
to a wxTextEntryDialog but then I ran into problems with the hardcoded
expectation of a 4 character prompt so I gave up. One alternative is to go
back to a wxTextEntryDialog and redefine both stdin and raw_input (at the
__builtin__ level, not locals, which was the problem with the previous code
I believe).

For example:

    def readRaw(self, prompt='Please enter your response:'):
        dialog = wxTextEntryDialog(None, prompt, \
                                   'Input Dialog (Raw)', '')
        try:
            if dialog.ShowModal() == wxID_OK:
                text = dialog.GetValue()
                return text
        finally:
            dialog.Destroy()
        return ''

And then wherever appropriate add:

            import __builtin__
            __builtin__.raw_input = readRaw  # Or the equivalent if readRaw
is passed as a parameter.
            del __builtin__

To do this, though, would require more changes to Boa than I was comfortable
making. And I wasn't sure you would agree with these changes.

It's not like anything is really broken, I'm just looking for a better
solution and wanted to jot this stuff down while it was fresh in my mind.
Feel free to disregard this message entirely. I just felt compelled to write
it.

To me the best solution would be something inline that wasn't so fragile. It
shouldn't display a prompt but it must be aware of the prompt that might be
passed to raw_input(), or that was written directly to stdout (which is all
that raw_input does anyway). In a way I think it should be modal, which is
what you get with the dialog approach. There is also the issue of whether to
leave the prompt and response in the output stream, which looks pretty ugly
in the case of license(). My readRaw() method basically swallows the prompt
and response, which looks better when you call license() but might be
inappropriate in other circumstances where you want the prompt and response
logged.

As you can see, I'm still looking for a solution.

---
Patrick K. O'Brien
Orbtech
"I am, therefore I think."