[IPython-dev] Improved piping functionality (was: ...dashing for black and white...)

[Walter Dörwald]

Ville Vainio wrote:
> On 7/14/06, Fernando Perez <fperez.net at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> I'd suggest trying to keep more inline with the python language, even
>> at the cost of some syntactic convenience.  My experience is that
>> otherwise, these rather obscure combinations of special syntax simply
>> won't be used by absolutely anyone outside 2 or 3 diehards.
> 
> I see this more as a shell-like feature, and the only thing to
> remember is "backticks are a shorthand for ix(cmd)". It's not too bad.

I'll give it a try, and we'll see how this works out.

BTW, about your proposal to let magic commands return ipipe tables: I
tried it with the history and couldn't get it to work. Either the output
of magic commands doesn't go through the display hooks, or we have a
bootstrapping problem.

A simplifying solution would be to use the ipipe display functionality
for everything not just for tables. I.e. instead of being able to switch
between pretty printed output and normal output the options would be:
* normal
* pretty print
* idump
* ibrowse
The default could be the same as for 0.7.2.

Of course for something that isn't iterable we'd need a fallback to
normal output.

Servus,
   Walter