Can "quit" be made to quit?

[kknechtel (Karl Knechtel)]

@steven.daprano

Surely this is something that people have to learn in the first twenty minutes of using Python.

You might be surprised if you saw some of the questions I close on Stack Overflow on a daily basis.

@steven.daprano

Why is it “unreasonable” to call the quit function with parens, but not everything else? If it is unreasonable for quit to need parens, then it is also unreasonable for help, and random, and len and all the other functions.

The argument isn’t that it’s unreasonable to need parens to call the quit function; the argument is that it’s unreasonable to need to call a function in order to quit the interpreter. After all, you didn’t write Python code to start the interpreter, either. If we are going to reinforce the understanding that the interpreter is a separate program that sits outside of the code being typed in, and interprets pieces of it one at a time (as opposed to how a script works), it stands to reason that this same program should accept other interactions, too. random and len are operating on existing Python objects; quit conceptually is operating on the interpreter. (help is a less clear-cut case; it can be envisioned either way.)

@steven.daprano

Hypothetically, we might choose to introduce a distintion between existing functions (to be pedantic: “callables”) like quit and exit, and a new class of entities “commands” which only exist in the interactive REPL, like IPython magics. But that distinction doesn’t currently exist.

I think the proposal is predicated upon forming this distinction, yes.

@steven.daprano

If you are serious about taking quit and exit “away from the language” and making them unavailable to scripts by default, that would be a breaking change and would have to go through the usual deprecation period.

I am, consequent to the above, serious about it, and I understand that it takes time to deprecate things that way. (Better, IMO, than being super-strict about semver and blowing up the version number to 100+ like web browsers do nowadays - since it doesn’t work anyway.)

That said, several alternate proposals ITT also make sense - including the “just change the string to be more regular and less presumptive” one.