Nick Coghlan wrote: > Samuele Pedroni wrote: > >>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. > > > Most of the times I've asked questions along these lines I've gotten > well-considered answers (usually because something I thought was a deliberate > design decision on Guido's part turned out to simply be an accident of the > way > it happened to be implemented in CPython). > > >>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. > > > I think Fredrik has made an excellent case for promoting the quit & exit > interpreter-only builtins to be proper callables. >
notice that I wrote that Ka-Ping Yee ExitHatch is an improvement! > Hell, we even have that capability for the callable that displays the > *license* text. . . surely quitting the interpreter is far more important > than > being able to display the license text, but the support for the latter is > significantly better: > > > Python 2.4.1 (#65, Mar 30 2005, 09:13:57) [MSC v.1310 32 bit (Intel)] on win32 > Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. > Py> exit > 'Use Ctrl-Z plus Return to exit.' > Py> quit > 'Use Ctrl-Z plus Return to exit.' > Py> license > Type license() to see the full license text > Py> type(license) > <class 'site._Printer'> > > Counting blank lines, 60 lines of site.py are devoted to getting copyright, > credit and license to work right, 16 to getting help to work, and only 12 to > setting quit and exit to the 'right' strings - and due to modules like > readline for Windows and differences in the way interpreters buffer the line > input, the exit string for Windows is not always correct. > > Cheers, > Nick. > _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com