Whatever logic currently used to print the 'Use quit() or Ctrl-Z plus Return to exit' message could also... quit the REPL in the first place, right?

I don't program Python much but do its users constantly type "quit" but not actually want to quit such that the REPL special cases this situation?

> Whatever logic currently used to print the 'Use quit() or Ctrl-Z plus Return to exit' message could also... quit the REPL in the first place, right?

That one would probably be somewhat risky actually, that message is the "repr" of the quit object/function, displaying results at the repl invokes repr… but so does printing most containers, so e.g. `vars(__builtins__)` (to get a quick list of the builtins) would also quit the repl, which would be undesirable.

There is no special logic behind it. It just prints the value of the variable with the name "quit", the same way it would print the value of the variable "foo" if you typed "foo".

The repl's basically supposed to help you write a program by matching the behavior of Python itself. What if I've got a variable called "quit" and I want to check its value?

The repl treats it specially because "quit", taken out of the context of the repl, makes sense as something to type in when trying to quit an unfamiliar program, not because actual Python programmers are likely to type it often.

> So it actually doesn't

It does, it just does not care.

> it's basically just a hack around the fact that the repl is basically:

I know what a REPL is. Here's an idea: it's not difficult to add an exit special case to the REPL.

> Case in point:

Case in point: the developers added a "help text" to tell users to go fuck themselves, knowing exactly what users wanted to do and refusing to do it. quit's repr didn't appear by magic, it was put there, knowingly, by people who understood exactly what they were doing.

quit is not a piece of repl functionality, it is a python function that will exit the repl when called, with a string representation that gives that message. If I set quit = 1, or if I define my own quit() function, I don't want to have to be continually fighting the repl in order to inspect its value.

Humane programming is something I wish compiler and language builders would do more of

Approximately 50% of the contributors in this thread argue actively against it, so I wouldn't hold my breath ;)

That was not lost on me. They're wrong, and kinda mean TBH, but someday someone will make a pretty good language, with a really helpful compiler/interpreter and will have the viral-fu to get it in use

It's insidiously more malevolent than that, considering how much productivity is wasted.