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Yes, I think you're right.  I guess I'm suffering a lack of focus, 
finding it hard to resist the impulse to fix what look like ancient 
bogosities in the area while I'm there... (also see the way a NULL 
return from PyOS_Readline is assumed to be a keyboard 
interrupt).

One could argue that ^C should always interrupt an interactive 
session, but one could also argue that users shouldn't be so daft 
as to install handlers for SIGINT if they want that to be true (after 
all, they can make life hard for themselves if they want with 
stty(1)).

A downside to all this footling is that it makes a backport to 2.3 
harder to justify.  Hmm.  I wander what Guido thinnks (he's 
alledgedly "now maintaining" Modules/readline.c :-).