GeezerVison

The current code uses args[1].strip().
Even though I don't have an example for when this would be useful, I suggest not to omit .strip() here to maintain consistency with the rest of the code here.

args[1].strip() only strips spaces, which int() takes care of when it tries to convert the string to integer. This is redundant so I removed it.

Fair enough, thanks for explaining

To avoid this, the __doc__ of the caller could be passed in explicitly.
This would add some verbosity to the calls, but these are already identical in terms of the arguments.

There's no clean way to pass the __doc__ of the caller inside the caller. I'd rather keep the ugliness in a single place and document it, than pollute everywhere. With this hack(which is not hard to understand as long as you are familiar with the frame/code structure), all the callers are very clean. Similar methods are actually used to get the docs for all the commands.

I understand the motivation here. Both solutions are not ideal and if equally "unclean" pulling it in a single place does make sense. Whether this is the case here, may be just personal opinion....

Maybe consider using {arg!r} to avoid confusion when arg contains spaces

!r simply calls repr() for arg and as arg is str, it should have the identical behavior. Not sure what you are trying to achieve here, could you give an example where !r gives a different result?

Oh I was wrong about repr(str) returns indentical result, don't know what I was thinking. repr() actually returns a worse result:

(Pdb) r '"'
*** Invalid argument: '\'"\''
      Usage: r(eturn)
(Pdb) 

{args} prints exactly what user types and that is more intuitive.

I usually use repr to add quotes. Didn't realize that there was additional escaping happening. The motivation here is to make arg appear as a single value. This really is just a nit, so...

Actually, taking a look at the rest of the code, I realized people have different ideas about this. The current implementation contains a mix of %r and %s and different efforts to "contain" the argument with ' or (). Some, however, is untouched. It might be beneficial if we could unify them - %r has the escaping side effect and we should use explicit quotes if possible.