On Tue, Oct 20, 2020 at 10:19 PM Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:
I think it would be a tad more convincing if there was a way to pass arguments too (even if just a list of strings). At the very least extra arguments should end up in sys.argv[1:].
Could python -m 'module:thunk' have exactly the same behavior with respect to arguments as `python3.8 -m module` does today? ``` $ cat bar.py import pprint, sys def thunk(): pprint.pprint(sys.argv) if __name__ == "__main__": thunk() $ python3.8 -m bar -- -1 --two --three=3 ['/Users/michael/bar.py', '--', '-1', '--two', '--three=3'] ``` So then with the same bar.py, `python -m bar:thunk -- -2 --three --four=4` would print `['/Users/michael/bar.py', '--', '-1', '--two', '--three=3']`. I like this better than my previous suggestion to shorthand python -c.
Then again, presumably the function must be specially crafted for this usage. Why can't you just specially craft a module's main()?
I'm not sure I know what you mean by "specially crafted", other than the function only needs not require any formal parameters. It doesn't need to be special-er than that. It can handle args via sys.argv, as you suggested. Most of the `main` functions I write today are just like that.
On Tue, Oct 20, 2020 at 7:10 PM Michael Smith <michael@smith-li.com> wrote:
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.
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-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido) Pronouns: he/him (why is my pronoun here?)