Baffled by readline module

[Grant Edwards]

In an interactive command-line Python program on Linux, I want to be
able to read a line at a time from stdin, providing command line
history and editing to the user. In C, I would use GNU readline to do
that.

Python has the readline module, which appears to be a wrapper for GNU
readline. However, I've read and re-read the documenation for that
module, but I'm completely baffled. There's all sorts of stuff about
history files, but I neither need nor want a history file. Likewise
tab-completion: don't want it.  All the examples not only involve
history files and tab-completion but they're somehow connected to the
interactive Python REPL, which is also completely off-base for my use
case.

Is the readline module not the right tool for an interactive Linux
command-line application that needs to provide command line recall and
editing to the user who's entering stuff on stdin from a tty?