IDLE not use the new interactive shell

[Wulian233]

Bug report

Bug description:

In 3.13: Direct support for REPL-specific commands like help, exit, and quit, without the need to call them as functions.

But the 3.13 Idle still needs to call them as functions.

CPython versions tested on:

3.13, CPython main branch

Operating systems tested on:

No response

Linked PRs

• gh-123369: IDLE now support for REPL-specific commands, like help exit license and quit without the need to call them as functions #123525

[terryjreedy]

I don't quite consider this a bug, but it does not matter for backporting. Do you know how this is implemented? In repl.py? Or code module? I just checked and help() still works and help(object) is still required rather than help object (which is SyntaxError).

[Wulian233]

In Lib/_pyrepl/

https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/main/Lib/_pyrepl/simple_interact.py#L73-L80
↑It seems simple to implement

https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/main/Lib/_pyrepl/simple_interact.py#L122-L126

https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/main/Lib/_pyrepl/commands.py#L435-L440

Where is the IDLE code? pyshell.py?

[terryjreedy]

Thank you for the links. My initial thoughts after reading them and studying some of the surrounding code:

The site module adds 6 names to builtins: help and 5 others others. REPL_COMMANDS maps help to a string to be executed as an 'internal command'. I don't know why quit, exit, and copyright are redefined, as I believe the definitions are unchanged. Since copyright already prints its text without (), just as credits (not in REPL_COMMANDS) does, I am not sure why it is present, unless to execute as a command rather than as code.

I believe an IDLE implementation might minimally append () to bare exit and quit in the appropriate place in pyshell, before calling compile. Ideally, only single line entries would be checked, but Shell does not currently treat this case separately.

For IDLE, there is a question of whether code should be executed in the IDLE or user process. The site additions other than help(ob) can be done in either, it seems, though I do not know how quit/exit() in the user process causes the IDLE process to exit. Clearing Shell has to be done in the IDLE process, and there is an issue to add a menu item and shortcut. Copyright, credits, and license (without paging) are in About IDLE, where they belong in a GUI app.