[Patches] fileinput.py argument handling (and suggestion)

[Guido van Rossum]

> Well, that's one.  Is anyone else interested in seeing a super-beefed up
> (possibly over-engineered) "read a `text' file with some subset of the
> usual Unix conventions" class added to fileinput.py?

To me, text_file.py really works at a higher level than fileinput.py.
It deals with lexical analysis issues: comments, line continuations,
whitespace stripping.  But it isn't very configurable: it has fixed
notions of what's a continuation line, what's a comment, and so on,
and you can only define a simple "profile" of options.

For another approach, see Eric Raymond's shlex.py, which is a standard
module since Python 1.5.2.  It deals with splitting into tokens and
handling quotes -- again, using rather fixed rules, although you can
change what's a quote and what's in a word (a step up from
text_file.py).

Together with ConfigParser.py, I think we've got a rather eclectic and
haphazard set of modules.  Before we standardize on any particular
one, we should analyze the needs of our users more!

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)