Python Development Gui - IDLE on CentOS

Many python books, articles and learning guides refer to a python development GUI named IDLE. Why its recommended is that it comes with features that many other text editors - such as VI and gedit - have such as highlighting and closing (where it shows if you have not closed off a string for example) but IDLE also comes with the ability to show you where you may be making mistakes.

I have been working in VI, gedit, notepad++ and even the python shell of late. While all are usable - and yes I still revert to VI a lot - with all the references being made to IDLE I thought I would take a look.

I first tried it on Windows 7 - all good and an easy install as it is included in the installer exe.
I then tried it on Ubuntu - again, easy to install as you can just search for it in the software installer.

Alas, I then tried CentOS and came up short. In fairness I was using the cmdline more, as I often do in CentOS, but I could not find a package named IDLE.

For any others who need IDLE on CentOS and also didnt find many articles about it, its really very easy.

bash#: sudo yum install python-tools

its as easy as that!

Just out of interest

While researching a SQL date problem, I came across this and as it is quite interesting and informative, I have decided to post it here as well.

This is not my or the Research Team's work, so credit is given to the original source:
http://www.karaszi.com/sqlserver/info_datetime.asp#RecommendationsInput


Why is 1753 the earliest date for datetime?
Good question. It is for historical reasons. In what we sometimes refer to as the western world, we have had two calendars in modern time: the Julian and the Gregorian calendars. These calendars were a number of days apart (depending on which century you look at), so when a culture that used the Julian calendar moved to the Gregorian calendar, they dropped from 10 to 13 days. Great Britain made this shift in 1752 (1752-09-02 were followed by 1752-09-14). An educated guess why Sybase selected 1753 as earliest date is that if you were to store an earlier date than 1753, you would also have to know which country and also handle this 10-13 day jump. So they decided to not allow dates earlier than 1753. Note, however that other countries did the shift later than 1752. Turkey, for instance, did it as late as 1927.
Being Swedish, I find it a bit amusing that Sweden had the weirdest implementation. They decided to skip the leap day over a period of 40 years (from 1700 to 1740), and Sweden would be in sync with the Gregorian calendar after 1740 (but meanwhile not in sync with anyone). However, in 1704 and 1708 the leap day wasn't skipped for some reason, so in 1712 which was a leap year, they inserted yet an extra day (imagine being born in Feb 30!) and then did the shift over a day like everyone else, in 1753.