[Python-ideas] Have REPL print less by default

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 06:28:40PM -0400, Terry Reedy wrote:
> On 4/19/2016 12:18 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> >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:
> 
> Tracebacks produce *pairs* of lines: the location and the line itself.

Only if the source code is available. The source isn't available for 
functions defined in the REPL, for C code, or for Python functions 
read from a .pyc file where the .py file is not available.

The code I gave before works with pairs of location + source, without 
any change. If I move the definition of fact into a file, so that the 
source lines are included, we get:

py> sys.setrecursionlimit(10)
py> fact(30)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/home/steve/python/fact.py", line 3, in fact
    return n*fact(n-1)
  [...repeat previous line 7 times...]
  File "/home/steve/python/fact.py", line 2, in fact
    if n < 1: return 1
RuntimeError: maximum recursion depth exceeded in comparison


I'd want to adjust the wording. Perhaps "previous entry" rather than 
previous line?


> Replacing pairs with a count of repetitions would not lose information, 
> and would make the info more visible.  I would require at least, say, 3 
> repetitions before collapsing.

That's what my example does: it only collapses the line/(pair of lines) 
if there are at least three identical repetitions.



-- 
Steve