[Tutor] copyright statement

[Terry Carroll]

On Thu, 19 Jan 2006, John Fouhy wrote:

> Anyone know anything about the 'copyright' statement? help(copyright)
> is not ultra helpful, and I can't see anything in the docs (eg,
> http://python.org/doc/2.4.2/ref/simple.html doesn't list it).  Is it
> ever intended to be used in normal code?

No, not really.

copyright isn't a statement, it's just a variable:

>>> type(copyright)
<class 'site._Printer'>
>>> copyright.__doc__
'interactive prompt objects for printing the license text, a list of\n    
contributors and the copyright notice.'
>>> print copyright
Copyright (c) 2000-2005 ActiveState Corp.

Copyright (c) 2001-2005 Python Software Foundation.
All Rights Reserved.

Copyright (c) 2000 BeOpen.com.
All Rights Reserved.

Copyright (c) 1995-2001 Corporation for National Research Initiatives.
All Rights Reserved.

Copyright (c) 1991-1995 Stichting Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam.
All Rights Reserved.


It's a variable set up in site.py (go have a look), intended for use in 
the interactive session, so a user can just type in the variable name and 
get some copyright information.

In the main() method in site.py, you'll see 

   setcopyright()

which just calls that method to initialize the copyright variable.

Similarly setquit() sets up a variable named "quit" that contains 
instructions on how to quit; so that when a user types "quit" they see the 
value of the variable, which tells them how to quit.