New submission from David Kerkeslager <david.kerkesla...@gmail.com>:
This problem arose in this thread: http://www.python-forum.org/pythonforum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=11606 Basically, we have the following function which will generate an XHTML node: def xhtmlNode(tag, *content, **attr):... If we call: xhtmlNode('div',id='sidebar','Hello, world') ... it should generate the xhtml: <div id='sidebar'>Hello, world</div> However, this isn't possible because the keyword argument isn't allowed to come before the 'vararg' argument. We could do this: xhtmlNode('div','Hello, world',id='sidebar') ... but this would not have symmetry with the generated xhtml and therefore complicates the code. The solution, in my opinion, is to allow varargs to be intermixed with keyword args. The above real-world example shows a use-case for this more flexible functionality. If the following rules apply, there shouldn't be any issues: 1. Positional arguments must be in their position (positional arguments must come before all 'vararg' arguments and keyword arguments). 2. Varargs come in the order in which they are received, ignoring any keyword arguments that are intermixed. 3. Keyword arguments order doesn't matter (a dictionary isn't ordered). They can be intermixed with varargs. Thus the following call: xhtmlNode('div',id='sidebar',style='width:100px;float:left;','Hello,worl d',xhtmlNode('p','Hello, world')) ... would result in the following html: <div id='sidebar' style='width:100px;float:left;'> Hello, world <p>Hello, world</p></div> ---------- messages: 82839 nosy: Imagist severity: normal status: open title: Allow intermixing of keyword arguments and vargarg arguments _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue5383> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
