Comment 2 for bug 315706

I understand that argument. In our application we have created a user CLI based on IPython, partially because of being able to omit the parentheses. This makes it easier for users who are unfamiliar with Python but who have used other interfaces that do not need the parentheses. The case with signs (of course mostly the "-" sign) as first characters often occurs in our interface, hence the default IPython behavior breaks the general behavior of our interface and is thus undesirable. We are working with a locally modified version of IPython, but it would be nice to have an "official" switch to choose between the two options.