[IPython-dev] 0.9 beta, anything left?

[Fernando Perez]

On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 6:34 PM, Ville M. Vainio <vivainio at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 3:44 AM, Fernando Perez <fperez.net at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Any suggestions for alternatives?
>
> This would work for me, keyboardwise:
>
> cd =foo
>
> It seems kinda confusing unless you are writing it yourself, though
> (looks like assignment), and it doesn't come as naturally as --
> (logical followup of -<n>.
>
> I still prefer "--", cd can be special that way. People don't think of
> it as "unix command" and its usage becomes a second reflex. cd is not
> a command that needs to follow the logic of more rarely used commands.
> We should really consider end-user typing performance with the cost of
> slight inconsistency (which magics can have).

Let's go with the '=' option, then.  cd can be special that way :)
Otherwise for cd we'd have to implement special parsing logic, since
normal options handling would break given arbitrary --foo input.  As
'import this' says,

Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.

and this is a case where I agree with it, here the benefit of a
special case does not in any way outweigh the cost of breaking a
pattern.

We're aiming for much more consistency in the code going forward, so
we should raise the bar pretty high for special cases that break the
rules.

Cheers,

f