Modern Python Projects Transcripts
Chapter: Writing code
Lecture: Different python REPL
Login or
purchase this course
to watch this video and the rest of the course contents.
0:00
As you write Python code, you sometimes need to take it for a spin and do some interactive coding.
0:07
By default, You can start the interactive Python session, by calling Python in your terminal.
0:11
This will start a REPL. REPL stands for Read, Eval, Print, Loop. So, it's a program that will read your input, evaluate it,
0:19
print the results and loop again to the first step. The standard Python REPL is nice because it comes with Python out of the box,
0:28
but it's very basic, and in the long run, it's not convenient to use, in the other versions of Python. There was not even a tab completion.
0:39
So when I typed na and pressed tab, that would insert the tab instead of auto-completing the name variable. But if you want to write a for loop,
0:49
you still have to Add the indentation in the next lines by hand, instead of your REPL detecting it. So, that's still quite inconvenient.
1:00
So, if you do a lot of this interactive coding, there are much better Python REPL alternatives.
1:06
We have iPython, bPython and ptPython. I will talk about each of them in the next 3 lessons.