buggy python interpretter or am I missing something here?

[Gregory Ewing]

Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Jan 2014 12:22:22 -0800, Rick Johnson wrote:
> 
>>Why do we even need an "input" function anyway if all it is going to do
>>is read from stdin? 
> 
> That's not all it does.
> 
> For example, it handles backspacing, so that typing H E L O O BACKSPACE 
> BACKSPACE L O gives "HELLO" rather than "HELOO\x7f\x7fO".

No, it doesn't -- that's handled at a lower level.
Any other method of reading from stdin, as long
as it hasn't been redirected away from the console,
has the same behaviour.

I typed some backspaces in the input to each of the
following experiments, and they didn't end up in the
data:

 >>> import sys
 >>> x = sys.stdin.readline()
HELLO
 >>> x
'HELLO\n'
 >>> import os
 >>> f = os.fdopen(0)
 >>> y = f.readline()
adsxx
 >>> y
'adsxx\n'

So input() really is a pure convenience function.
(That doesn't mean it's not worth having, though!)

-- 
Greg