[Python-Dev] Pre-PEP Idea

[Paul Prescod]

Fredrik Lundh wrote:
> 
> ...
> 
> heh.  so that's why I'm having a slight headache; paul is
> in there stealing my ideas? ;-)

I should have just let you invent it!

> I got stuck on whether this is best implemented as a true
> builtin, or just patched into the builtins dictionary by site.py...

six of one, half dozen of the other.

 * builtin means a little more consistency across environments
 * ptach means a little less code on startup

What do you think of my ten-line bootstrapper idea. I weigh the former
slightly higher then the latter. Plus, I could perhaps put a helpful
message in the bootstrapper to help people debug site.py and PYTHONPATH
problems. :)

> 1) plus a sys.sethelphook function which allow the environ-
> ment to override the default behaviour; for example, if you're
> typing help("intro") in PythonWorks' console window, you pro-
> bably want to get nicely formatted help in the "info" panel,
> not in the console window itself.

Good idea. And eventually some way for extensions to register
themselves...and a pager. Do we have pager code hanging around? Some
docstrings are already long and we have no mechanism for breaking them
up ....

-- 
 Paul Prescod - Not encumbered by corporate consensus
It's difficult to extract sense from strings, but they're the only
communication coin we can count on. 
	- http://www.cs.yale.edu/~perlis-alan/quotes.html