[Python-ideas] REPL features

[David Mertz]

On Wed, Aug 22, 2018 at 7:47 PM Mike Miller <python-ideas at mgmiller.net>
wrote:

> >> On Tue, Aug 21, 2018 at 3:07 PM, Jonathan Fine <jfine2358 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>>> Maybe this is something Python's REPL should do?
> iPython brings in a lot of functionality, perhaps too much.
> Would prefer something more focused like bpython or ptpython.
>

Happily, you know where to get IPython, and BPython, and PTPython.
Different users have different desires for an enhanced REPL, and different
good, free software, projects exist.

I would tend to oppose most of these "fixes" to the basic Python REPL as
"feature creep."  Full featured interactive shells are great.  I use
IPython and Jupyter dozens of times every day myself. I love those.  But
they make specific decisions on what and how to enhance things, and have a
huge range of configuration options.  The `python` REPL should really be
just good enough to use, and allow other projects to provide the richer
experience (and to maintain all the code associated with making them
powerful and flexible).

Obviously, that's not saying categorically that "nothing can ever change"
in the Python REPL.  But most things I would lean against adding.  It does
basically as much as it should, with no more code than is necessary to do
that.

-- 
Keeping medicines from the bloodstreams of the sick; food
from the bellies of the hungry; books from the hands of the
uneducated; technology from the underdeveloped; and putting
advocates of freedom in prisons.  Intellectual property is
to the 21st century what the slave trade was to the 16th.
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