UNABLE TO GET IDLE TO RUN

Fri Oct 23 06:03:33 EDT 2015

On 10/23/2015 5:42 AM, Peter Otten wrote:
> Laura Creighton wrote:
>>> In a message of 2015年10月23日 00:19:42 -0400, Terry Reedy writes:
>>> On 10/21/2015 11:24 AM, Terry Alexander via Python-list wrote:
>>>>>>> I have tried installing both Python 2.7 and 3.5, and in both cases I
>>>> cannot get IDLE to work. I received the following message both times:
>>>>>> What OS? Windows? which version? How did you start IDLE? Start menu
>>> icon? Command line?
>>>>>>> IDLE’s subprocess didn’t make connection.Either IDLE can’t start a
>>>> subprocess or personal firewall software is blocking the connection.
>>>>>>>> I am running Norton, and disabled it, but still IDLE will not run. Any
>>>> suggestions?
>>>>>> Don't shout with ALL CAPS in the subject line. It usually indicates
>>> spam. I already know that this problem is very frustrating.
>>>>>> Firewalls are seldom the problems anymore. I occasionally saw this on
>>> Win 7 when restarting, but never on startup, and never more than once or
>>> twice in a session.
>>>>>> What's left is misconfiguration of your network interface that prevents
>>> a loopback connection. There might be answers on Stackoverflow that
>>> would help, depending on your OS.
>>>>>> In the meanwhile, you can start IDLE with the -n option. Either use a
>>> command line or create an 'IDLE -n' icon. Again, details depend on
>>> exact OS.
>>> Terry Jan Reedy
>>>> You can also get this message if you run idle in directory where you
>> have your own python file whose name shadows something in the
>> standard library (that idle is interested in). I think it was
>> a file named 'string.py' that did this to a student of mine a
>> few years ago.
>> Laura

I can imagine that a bad socket module might have this effect. With 
verification that a user file could have this effect, I would augment 
the message.
> I tried it out:
>> $ mkdir test
> $ cd test
> $ touch string.py
> $ idle3
> Traceback (most recent call last):
> File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
> File "/usr/lib/python3.4/idlelib/run.py", line 12, in <module>
> from idlelib import CallTips
> File "/usr/lib/python3.4/idlelib/CallTips.py", line 16, in <module>
> from idlelib.HyperParser import HyperParser
> File "/usr/lib/python3.4/idlelib/HyperParser.py", line 14, in <module>
> _ASCII_ID_CHARS = frozenset(string.ascii_letters + string.digits + "_")
> AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'ascii_letters'
>> Then idle shows the message and quits after you hit OK.
>> Is there a bug report?

No. Quitting because a stdlib module cannot be imported (or corrupted) 
is not a bug. AttributeError is a typical symptom. A user file called 
random.py is probably more common.
-- 
Terry Jan Reedy