Sent from my iPhone On Sep 22, 2015, at 6:21 PM, Fernando Perez <fperez.net@gmail.com In fact, that already happened once: before Python 2.4, our prefix for "magic functions" was the @ character, and when that was introduced as the decorator prefix, we had to scramble.� Note that the userbase of iPython was orders of magnitude smaller then -- changes like that would be a much bigger deal now. And while iPython was born in the scientific software community, and sees a lot (most) of its use there, it is by no means specific to that use case. In fact, if you use the standard REPL at all -- I encourage you to give it a try -- you will be very glad you did. -Chris