There are many ways to invoke a function from the commandline. You can
use setuptools' console_scripts entrypoint. You can use a decorator
from click. And of course you can always do the classic

if __name__ == "__main__":
  main()

to call whatever main() is. But there are inconveniences with these
approaches. For setuptools, you have to actually run setup, somehow.
For click, you have to install click. And for __name__, you are either
locked into a single function name, or you have to write some arg
parsing to determine what name to use.

I propose it would be nice to be able to call a function from python,
using syntax like

python -m module:thunk

The simplest proposal, I think, is if the function must accept no
arguments -- or at least no required ones. This could be as
straightforward as just being shorthand for

python -c 'import module; module.thunk()'

and remove a small amount of code that is repeated very frequently.

I picked the colon syntax because that is what several other tools
that enable calling functions from the commandline seem to do, but if
your only objection is the specific syntax I picked, please propose a
different one.

What do you think?
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