[Python-ideas] History stepping in interactive session?

[Andy Buckley]

On 05/10/12 12:26, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Andy Buckley writes:
> 
>  > A couple of weeks ago I posted a question on superuser.com
> 
> Maybe it's a bug.  (See below.)  Have you checked the tracker?  Have
> you posted to python-list?  That's a better place than here to get
> that kind of information.
>
>  > As you might have noticed,
> 
> The people on this list (and on python-dev) probably don't pay much
> attention to questions on superuser.com, unless they're the kind of
> people who hang out on python-list.

Hi Stephen -- thanks for the feedback. I know StackExchange sites are
not affiliated to the Python project! By "as you might have noticed" I
didn't mean to imply that you spend your time scouring all Q&A sites for
anything Python-related, but just that if you followed the link I posted
you'd probably notice the zero response :)

>From searching around before that SuperUser post, and some more
afterwards, I couldn't find any reference at all to history-stepping as
an available Python interpreter feature, so I was trying to suggest that
as a new feature -- not a bug report. Sorry if python-ideas is only for
language/stdlib features rather than the standard infrastructure.

However, I hadn't remembered when I first posted that I was already
making use of a PYTHONSTARTUP script with the readline module to enable
some history functionality -- I'd set that up years ago and ported it
between systems. So my premise that readline *should* work was not
accurate: sorry for the noise. Notably the operate-and-get-next readline
function (thanks for the bind -p suggestion) bound to Ctrl-o does not
work with Python readline... but I will follow up on that potential bug
elsewhere.

So one last question, in case it is an acceptable python-ideas topic:
how about adding readline-like support by default in the interpreter?
But maybe there is a reason for new users to have a more bare-bones,
no-history introduction to the language, unless they start with ipython?

Thanks again,
Andy