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UNABLE TO GET IDLE TO RUN

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
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 Fri, 23 Oct 2015 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
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