interpreter improvements

[Christopher A. Craig]

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kp87 at lycos.com (kevin parks) writes:

> Anyway, i spend all day in the interpreter and i was
> hoping to make it a more pleasant experience. I can't
> believe you can't do:
> 
> >>> foo(somereallylongbitofcodegoeshere,
> itsrealllybothersomeifyoumistype) [change a bunch of crap here]
> >>> !foo

You can't do this in Unix either.  With readline support you can use
emacs keybindings to go back, forward, search, etc., but no Python
interpreter that I know of messes with the syntax of the language to
enhance command history or expansion.  I think this is a good thing.
In shell these history and expansion tricks are part of the language,
that is "!foo" in shell means "run the last command starting with the
string 'foo'".  This is not part of the Python language and I don't
think you should be able to type something into the interpreter which
is not part of the language.

Now porting zsh's ZLE to Python is another matter entirely ;-)

- -- 
Christopher A. Craig <com-nospam at ccraig.org>
"May the source be with you."  -- Open Source Software mantra
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