[IPython-dev] Towards IPython 1.0, the famous big cleanup

[Ville Vainio]

On Sun, 2005-05-15 at 18:08 -0600, Fernando Perez wrote:

> Yes, there's the need for a table of names per type of special 
> callable, some escaping mechanism for explicit disambiguation (at least 
> for magics), and a bit of extra metadata here and there (command line 
> args, how to access ipython itself, etc.)

Why is the table needed? Is there an advantage over using good
old-fashioned modules for this? Considering that there will be no
name-mangling or anything...

> I _will_ do away with all the funny name mangling, and try to reuse as 
> much of the same structure as possible for magics, aliases, etc.

It would also be nice to be able to add new types of callables instead
of the old magics and aliases, if only for experimentation with new
features. Allowing to attach to the callables an user-specifiable
object that does the preprocessing will achieve this. Of course a
callable that takes the whole line can choose to do anything it wants,
but the api could be extended to provide user-configurable argument
completion etc...