Dogma

If you ever find yourself updating a single application in Arch Linux (a very bad idea, btw) and it upgrades readline you might end up seeing an error along the lines of:
/bin/bash: error while loading shared libraries: libreadline.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Hopefully you still have a bash prompt open and you haven’t closed them all. If you still can, immediately run the following:
pacman -S bash
else you won’t be able to run bash any more because bash would still be linking to the old version of readline.

Also, in future, don’t run
pacman -Sy application
(python in my case)
instead, run:
pacman -Syu
which will ensure that all applications are upgraded.

Personally, I think that bash should have had a dependency set saying that it required the old specific version of readline and the same for the new bash, requiring the new version of readline. Regardless, rather play it safe.