[Python-ideas] Have REPL print less by default

[Dan Sommers]

On Wed, 20 Apr 2016 02:18:58 +1000, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 11:12:16PM +1000, Nick Coghlan wrote:

>> The default REPL behaviour is appropriate for this "somewhat
>> experienced Pythonista tinkering with code to see how it behaves" use
>> case - keeping the results very close to what they would be if you
>> typed the same line of code into a text file and ran it that
>> way. It's not necessarily the best way to *learn* those equivalences,
>> but that's also not what it's designed for.

That's a pretty powerful argument:  running something in the REPL should
give the same results as running it from a command line.  When things
fail differently in different environments, the environments themselves
become suspects.

> I mostly agree with what you say, but I would like to see one change
> to the default sys.excepthook: large numbers of *identical* traceback
> lines (as you often get with recursion errors) should be
> collapsed. For example:

[...]

> Try as I might, I just don't see the value of manually counting all
> those 'File "<stdin>", line 3, in fact' lines to find out where the
> recursive call failed :-)

Yes, I see the smiley, but I would add specifically that the number of
calls in the stack trace from a recursive function is rarely the
important part.  When I write something recursive, and get *that* stack
trace, I don't have to scroll anywhere to look at anything to know that
I blew the termination condition(s).

(I'm agreeing with you:  there is no value of counting the number of
calls in the stack trace.)

If I suddenly got tiny stack traces, I'd spend *more* time realizing
what went wrong, until I retrained myself.