[Python-Dev] Handling of sys.args (Re: User's complaints)

[Brett Cannon]

On 7/13/06, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
>
> Ka-Ping Yee wrote:
>
> > Having to 'import sys' to get at the command-line arguments always
> > seemed awkward to me.  'import sys' feels like it should be a
> > privileged operation (access to interpreter internals), and getting
> > the command-line args isn't privileged.
>
> Would it help if sys were pre-imported into the builtins?
> Or do you think that args shouldn't live in sys at all?
>
> Recently I've come to appreciate the ability to get at
> the args from anywhere, instead of having to catch them
> from a call to main() and pass them around. So I'd
> like to still be able to import them from somewhere
> if I want (doesn't have to be sys, though).
>
> And while we're on the subject, anyone think it would
> be a good idea to drop the silly feature of having
> the program name as args[0]? You almost *never* want
> to treat it the same way as the rest of the args,
> so the first thing you always do is args[1:].
>
> It's not so bad in C, where it's just as easy to
> start indexing argv from 1 instead of 0. But it
> makes no sense in Python, IMO. It would be much
> more sensible to move it into a separate attribute
> of whatever module we decide to put args in.


Makes sense to me.  Ruby does this and it makes working with arguments a
little bit nicer.

-Brett
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