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After coming home from work today, I had a copy of PrimalCode lying around as an alternative UI for .NET so I installed it. As I installed it, I found that it was an editor for many “scripting languages” of which Python was one. So while I was at it, I thought I would try Mark's first program in Dive Into Python, an odbchelper function. This isn't going to be a deep post on Python and instead has to do with, egad, an IDE or two (and “IntelliSense“,) sacrilege!!, so the Python heads can stop reading now and go back to command line, vi, Emacs or whatever they are doing. For the rest of us, having had incredible language IntelliSense support in the VS IDE, I was more interested in seeing what this IDE would give me in language support. The bad news is that all I seemed to get what syntax coloring (oh boy!) but going over to ActiveState's ActivePython IDE gave me full “IntelliSense” and provided a much better experience in terms of direct integration with the Python runtime in an interactive window which also had IntelliSense. So it looks like ActivePython may be the best so far in terms of learning the language, at least in a way us Microsoft types are used to. The first program (which I didn't bother modifying for my use) follows:

def buildConnectionString(params)
    """Build a connection string from a dictionary of parameters
   
    Returns string."""
    return ";".join(["%s=%s" % (k,v) for k, v in params.items()])
   
if __name__ == "__main__";
    myParams = {"server":"mpilgrim", \
                "database":"master", \
                "uid":"sa", \
                "pwd":"secret" \
                }
    print buildConnectionString(myParams)

The Python doc feature is cool:

>>> import odbchelper
>>> params = {"server":"mpilgrim", "database":"master", "uid":"sa",
... "pwd":"secret"}
>>> print odbchelper.buildConnection(params)
pwd=secret;database=master;uid=sa;server=mpilgrim
>>> print odbchelper.buildConnection.func_doc
Build a connection string from a dictionary of parameters.