[Python-Dev] info/advices about python readline implementation

[Gregory Lielens]

Hi,

Lisandro Dalcin and me are working on a common version of our patches
([1232343],[955928]) that we plan to submit soon (this would close the
two previously proposed patches, and we plan also to review 5 other
patches to push this one before 2.5 ;-) ). 

We would like this new patch to be as clean and as safe as possible, but
to do so we would need some infos/advices from the list, and in
particular peoples having worked in the readline C implementation, i.e.
in modules Modules/readline.c,  Parser/myreadline.c (PyOS_StdioReadline,
PyOS_StdioReadline, vms__StdioReadline), Python/bltinmodule.c
(builtin_raw_input).

First a general question about implementation guidelines for CPython:
   -is it ok to initialize a static pointer to a non-null value (the
address of a predefined function) at compile time? ANSI-C (or even
pre-ansi C afaik) accept this, we have tested it on various linux and
unix, and there are occurrences of similar construct in the python C
sources, but not so many and not for function pointers (or I did not
found it ;) ).
We wonder if this can cause problem on some platforms not correctly
implementing C standard(s) but that python have to support nonetheless,
or if there is a feeling against it...The idea is to initialize
PyOS_ReadlineFunctionPointer this way.

Then something about the VMS platform support:
  -readline seems to make uses of the extern function
vms__StdioReadline() on VMS...Where can we find the source or doc about
this function? In particular, we would like to know if this function
call (or can call) PyOS_StdioReadline, which would cause infinite
recursion in some version of our patch....without havind access to VMS
for testing or info about vms__StdioReadline, this is impossible to
know...

Thanks for any info,

Greg.