On Mon, Oct 08, 2012 at 05:12:24PM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Andy Buckley writes:
So one last question, in case it is an acceptable python-ideas topic: how about adding readline-like support by default in the interpreter?
If readline-like support is available on the system, it's used. However, it's apparently only readline-like. For example, on Mac OS X, the BSD-licensed libedit readline emulation is used by default, it appears. I wouldn't expect full functionality there.
On GNU/Linux systems, as I wrote, True GNU readline is used. Why this particular function isn't bound or doesn't work right, I don't know offhand. It is apparently a bug (my Python sources are from April, but I can't see why this would change), since the sources say (ll. 927-931 of Modules/readline.c):
I thought so too, but apparently the behaviour being talked about is a bash extension to readline. Adding it to Python would be a feature request, not a bug fix. While it's a useful feature, I think that it's probably something which can distinguish the vanilla Python interactive interpreter from more advanced environments like iPython, which apparently already has it. -- Steven