[IPython-dev] Towards IPython 1.0, the famous big cleanup

[Fernando Perez]

Ville Vainio wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-04-14 at 17:19 -0600, Fernando Perez wrote:
> 
> 
>>- the magic system will be fully overhauled.  The core of your custom magics 
>>will most likely run unchanged, but how they plug into ipython will change.
> 
> 
> I've probably said this before, but -
> 
> Do we need a magic system at all?
> 
> It would be cleaner if what are now "magic" would be just normal Python
> functions/callables, with some additional metadata about how it wants to
> receive the argument string. To behave exactly like magics (apart from
> separate namespace and %), it would just need to take a single string
> (the whole command line) as argument. 

Well, that's pretty much what they do today.  It's just that making a new 
magic involves binding by hand an instance method with a special name, for 
example:

from IPython.iplib import InteractiveShell

def magic_runbatch(self, parameter_s=''):
     """ runbatch magic command.
     """
     try:
         fileobj = open(parameter_s,'r')
     except:
         print "Error: could not open file",parameter_s
         return
     else:
         self.shell.runlines(fileobj.read())

InteractiveShell.magic_runbatch = magic_runbatch
del magic_runbatch

What I envision, is something cleaner, more like:

__IPYTHON__.set_new_magic(your_function,optional_name='mymagic',opt_args=...)

And that's it.  Any function you write can be made into a magic, as long as it 
conforms to a minimal API.  When I actually start working on this (probably 
item #2 after the config system rewrite), I'll make sure to post my plan to 
this list, so anyone with thoughts/criticisms can voice them early on before I 
spend too much time coding myself into a silly corner.

> Shell commands would all refer to the same object, one that takes the
> whole command line and does the deed.

Again, today we pretty much have this already, it's just not cleanly indicated 
and documented.

But thanks for the comments: I _really_ want people to voice any and all 
concerns or ideas they may have in this direction.  I hope that when 1.0 comes 
out, we can be reasonably happy that the publicly exposed API is stable enough 
that users can rely on it for a while.  So by all means, speak up!

Best,

f