[Python-3000] Move argv[0]? (Re: Unicode and OS strings)

[Guido van Rossum]

This sounds awfully close to bikeshedding. Change too many details
like this and you cause death by a 1000 pinpricks for existing apps.
sys.argv[0] *does* get used (though arguably rarely in the same way as
sys.argv[1:]).

--Guido

On 9/15/07, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
>  > Also "argv" sounds more low-level than something like "arguments".
>
> While we're on the subject of argv, I've been wondering
> whether py3k might want to revisit the idea of having
> argv[0] be the program name. In my experience, one almost
> *never* wants to treat argv[0] the same way as the rest of
> the arguments.
>
> Putting the program name into argv[0] is a neat
> trick in C that's relatively harmless, because it's
> just as easy to start iterating from 1 than 0, but
> in Python it makes all argument-processing code
> more complicated than necessary.
>
> It also provides a nasty trap for the unwary, as I
> discovered one day when I wrote a program for deleting
> files that deleted itself the first time I ran it. :-)
>
> Changing the existing behaviour of argv would probably
> be too disruptive, so how about relegating argv to a
> low-level detail and providing something else for
> everyday use that omits argv[0]?
>
> sys.arguments would sound quite nice for that.
>
> --
> Greg
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-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)