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

Samuele Pedroni pedronis at strakt.com
Thu Dec 29 20:45:19 CET 2005

Michael Chermside wrote:

The F-bot writes:

in reality, some things are carefully thought out and craftily im- plemented, some things are engineering tradeoffs made at a certain time, and some things are just accidents -- but python-dev will happily defend the current solution with the same energy, no matter what it is. +1 QOTF. Seriously... I've seen this behavior also, but I haven't ever thought about it as clearly as Fredrik does here. When we go to answer questions we ought to pause briefly first and decide which of these categories applies to a given piece of behavior. I think users will be understanding if we're honest about what are the accidents -- every language or software package has some, and just because it's an accident does NOT mean we should "fix" it.

it's indeed a matter of trade-offs. Converting NameErrors into commands doesn't look like a good trade off in terms of expectations management and understandable behavior. Ka-Ping Yee ExitHatch still seem a reasonable improvement. Fernando Perez considerations about Python vs. "commands" and prefixing and extra-linguistic extensions seem also on spot. It's not a matter of defending the status quo, more about what kind of price is reasonable for DWIM.

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