[Python-Dev] a quit that actually quits (original) (raw)

Walter Dörwald walter at livinglogic.de
Wed Dec 28 18:04:55 CET 2005

Alex Martelli wrote:

On Dec 28, 2005, at 3:24 AM, Michael Hudson wrote:

skip at pobox.com writes:

Fredrik> a quit/exit command that actually quits, instead of printing a Fredrik> "you didn't say please!" message.

I like Fredrik's idea more and more. The thing that bothers me about it is that the standard way you tell python to do something is "call a function" -- to me, a special case for exiting the interpreter seems out of proportion. Just brainstorming, but -- maybe this means we should generalize the idea? I.e., allow other cases in which "just mentioning X" means "call function Y [with the following arguments]", at least at the interactive prompt if not more generally. If /F's idea gets implemented by binding to names 'exit' and 'quit' the result of some factory-call with "function to be called" set to sys.exit and "arguments for it" set to () [[as opposed to specialcasing checks of last commandline for equality to 'exit' &c]]

We have sys.displayhook and sys.excepthook. Why not add a sys.inputhook? sys.inputhook gets passed each line entered and may return True if it has processed the line inself and False if normal handling of the input should be done. This allows special treatment of "quit", "exit", "help" and it might make implementing alternative shells for Python easier (without having to subclass code.InteractiveConsole).

then the implementation of the generalization would be no harder. I do find myself in sessions in which I want to perform some action repeatedly, and currently the least typing is 4 characters (x()) while this would reduce it to two

What's wrong with , ?

(iPython does allow such handy shortcuts, but I'm often using plain interactive interpreters).

If this generalization means a complicated implementation, by all means let's scrap it, but if implementation is roughly as easy, it may be worth considering to avoid making a too-special "special case" (or maybe not, but brainstorming means never having to say you're sorry;-).

Bye, Walter Dörwald

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list