[Python-Dev] quit() on the prompt (original) (raw)

Ian Bicking ianb at colorstudy.com
Tue Mar 7 22:44:49 CET 2006

Frederick suggested a change to quit/exit a while ago, so it wasn't just a string with slight instructional purpose, but actually useful. The discussion was surprisingly involved, despite the change really trully not being that big. And everyone drifted off, too tired from the discussion to make a change. I suppose it didn't help that the original proposal struck some people as too magic, while there were some more substantive problems brought up as well, and when you mix aesthetic with technical concerns everyone gets all distracted and worked up. Anyway, I would like to re-propose one of the ideas that came up (originally from Ping?):

class Quitter(object): def init(self, name): self.name = name def repr(self): return 'Use %s() to exit' % self.name def call(self): raise SystemExit() quit = Quitter('quit') exit = Quitter('exit')

This is not very magical, but I think is more helpful than the current behavior. It does not satisfy the "just do what I said" argument for not requiring the call (quit() not quit), but eh -- I guess it seemed like everything that didn't require a call had some scary corner case where the interpreter would abruptly exit.

-- Ian Bicking / ianb at colorstudy.com / http://blog.ianbicking.org

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