[issue44603] REPL: exit when the user types exit instead of asking them to explicitly type exit()

[Mark Dickinson]

Mark Dickinson <dickinsm at gmail.com> added the comment:

> the confusion that it can cause when there is a mismatch between the interactive interpreter and noninteractive execution

I've witnessed similar confusion when teaching, using IPython. After discovering that you can do

    In [1]: import pandas as pd
    In [2]: cd datafiles
    /Users/mdickinson/Desktop/datafiles
    In [3]: df = pd.read_csv("experiment0023.csv")

it's then a common error to copy those lines to a script and expect them to work. We learned to recommend that IPython's automagic always be turned off, so that at least we could easily explain that "if it starts with a %, it's a magic command interpreted by the IPython layer; otherwise it's passed to Python".

If Python grew a similar interpreter layer (which seems like one possible solution here), I think we'd have the same issue of making it easy for users to distinguish "commands" intended for the interactive interpreter from those interpreted by the Python core. I could imagine ending up with users typing "%exit" or "!exit" to exit, but one you're adding an extra sigil to distinguish your commands from plain old references to Python objects it doesn't seem so different from having to type "exit()".

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<https://bugs.python.org/issue44603>
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