Craig Ringer <craig@2ndquadrant.com> writes:
> I doubt I've ever written just "exit" or "quit" without indentation. I
> think if it requires them to be a bareword with no indentation, strictly
> ^(exit|quit)\n when isatty, then that's probably a safe and helpful choice.
FWIW, I think that the special behavior (whatever it winds up being
exactly) ought to trigger on an input line matching
[whitespace]*help[whitespace]*(;[whitespace]*)?
and similarly for exit/quit. I think that novices might have internalized
enough SQL syntax to think that they need to terminate the command with a
semicolon --- in fact, we regularly see examples in which seasoned users
think they need to terminate backslash commands with a semicolon, so
that's hardly far-fetched. And we might as well allow as much whitespace
as we can, because nobody but Guido Rossum thinks that having whitespace
be semantically significant is a good idea.
regards, tom lane