interpreter command line recall/editing/completion under Windows (was Re: interpreter improvements)

[John Machin]

Skip Montanaro <skip at pobox.com> wrote in message news:<mailman.995680066.20051.python-list at python.org>...
> 
> As for command history and command completion, sounds like you must be stuck
> on Windows.  Readline and rlcompleter do a decent job of command recall and
> with the atexit module you can save the history file across sessions.

Indeed there are a lot of us rabbits stuck in those briar patches,
whether we asked to be thrown there or not :-)

However there seem to be different sub-species of briar:

Win NT4 seems to support "DOSKEY" style command editing inside any
application, including Python -- one just hits the up-arrow key and
there's the previous input, waiting to be edited. This is without my
having done anything special to make this happen (that I'm aware of!).
This facility is just so handy for fiddling around, checking what
works and what doesn't, trying out one-liners, experimenting with the
2.2 alpha goodies, etc etc that everyone IMO should just have it
straight away when they get Python out of the box.

Win 95B seems to do command editing only at the DOS prompt level, not
within applications -- certainly not within the Python interpreter.

I recall from a thread a few weeks ago that there were 2 or 3
competing but not widely-known and not (AFAIR) novice-installable
solutions to this problem. How can we progress this? Would it be
possible to build something into the standard Win32 distribution?