Professional IronPython

TAbLE 6-1: 
Standard Library Modules Missing from IronPython
__future__.pyc 
_abcoll.pyc 
abc.pyc 
ast.py
BaseHTTPServer.pyc 
bdb.pyc 
bisect.pyc 
code.pyc
codecs.pyc 
codeop.pyc 
collections.pyc 
ConfigParser.pyc
copy.pyc 
copy_reg.py 
copy_reg.pyc 
cProfile.py
csv.py 
dbhash.py 
dis.pyc 
fnmatch.pyc
functools.pyc 
genericpath.pyc 
getopt.pyc 
gzip.py
heapq.pyc 
inspect.pyc 
keyword.pyc 
linecache.pyc
locale.pyc 
mimetools.pyc 
ntpath.pyc 
opcode.pyc
os.pyc 
pkgutil.pyc 
pty.py 
pydoc.pyc
Queue.pyc 
random.pyc 
re.py 
re.pyc
repr.pyc 
rfc822.pyc 
shlex.pyc 
site.pyc
socket.py 
socket.pyc 
SocketServer.pyc 
sre.py
sre_compile.pyc 
sre_constants.pyc 
sre_parse.pyc 
ssl.py
stat.pyc 
string.pyc 
stringprep.py 
struct.pyc
subprocess.py 
subprocess.pyc 
symtable.py 
tabnanny.pyc
tempfile.pyc 
threading.pyc 
token.pyc 
tokenize.pyc
traceback.pyc 
tty.py 
types.pyc 
UserDict.pyc
warnings.pyc 
webbrowser.py 
webbrowser.pyc
Getting all of the modules found in the original Python Standard Library would be reason enough 
to download, install, and use it. However, the Python Standard Library provides a number of addi-
tional features in the form of help files and utilities. Although you can’t use the utilities to perform 
.NET-specific work, you can use them to ensure your code is truly compatible with Python, which is 
a big deal if you plan to use your application on other platforms. With this in mind, here’s a list of 
the additional help files and utilities provided with the Python Standard Library. (You can read more 
about them in the “Using the Standard Library Features” section of the chapter.)
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CHAPTER 6
Using the Python standard Library
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IDLE (Integrated DeveLopment Environment): A graphical user interface to work with 
Python code. In many respects, this is a much nicer interface than the command line version 
of the IronPython interpreter. Most important, you can save your work, which means that 
you can possibly use IDLE as an alternative to Visual Studio if desired. Of course, IDLE 
doesn’t know anything about working with the .NET Framework and you can’t use it to 
write multi-language applications.
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Module Docs: An HTML-formatted help file that provides complete documentation of the 
various Python Standard Library modules. Interestingly enough, you can use this help file 
with IronPython without modification because this is the documentation that IronPython’s 
Standard Library is written to support. For the most part, this help file is brief and not very 
detailed, but it’s good when you need a quick reference.
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Python (command line): An application that works precisely like the IronPython command 
line. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to tell the two apart. The only reason you’d want to use 
the Python command line is to test the cross-platform compatibility of a module you write. 
Otherwise, you’ll want to use the IronPython command line to ensure your code runs prop-
erly with IronPython.
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Python Manuals: This is the detailed help file you probably wanted with IronPython, but 
didn’t receive. You’ll definitely want to spend some time looking around this help file and 
discovering new things about the Python language.
Now that you have a better idea of what the Python Standard Library provides, you need to consider 
how you’ll use it or whether you want to use it at all. Just how the Python Standard Library affects 
your organization and you depends on your goals. For the most part, you’ll use these tools when you 
want to write pure Python applications or applications that rely heavily on Python (versus the mixed 
language applications found later in this book). It’s important to remember that IronPython has a lot 
to offer that Python doesn’t, so you need to decide which route your organization will take before 
you make a commitment to pure Python by using the Python Standard Library.