On 28.02.17 23:17, Victor Stinner wrote:
My question is: would it make sense to implement this feature in
Python directly? If yes, what should be the syntax? Use "/" marker?
Use the @positional() decorator?
I'm strongly +1 for supporting positional-only parameters. The main
benefit to me is that this allows to declare functions that takes
arbitrary keyword arguments like Formatter.format() or
MutableMapping.update(). Now we can't use even the "self" parameter and
need to use a trick with parsing *args manually. This harms clearness
and performance.
The problem with the "/" marker is that it looks ugly. There was an
excuse for the "*" marker -- it came from omitting the name in "*args".
The "*" prefix itself means an iterable unpacking, but "/" is not used
neither as prefix nor suffix.
Do you see concrete cases where it's a deliberate choice to deny
passing arguments as keywords?
dict.__init__(), dict.update(), partial.__new__() and partial.__call__()
are obvious examples. There are others.
And there was performance reason. Just making the function supporting
keyword arguments added an overhead even to calls with only positional
arguments. This was changed recently, but I didn't checked whether some
overhead is left.
Don't you like writing int(x="123") instead of int("123")? :-) (I know
that Serhiy Storshake hates the name of the "x" parameter of the int
constructor ;-))
I believe weird names like "x" was added when the support of "base"
keyword was added due to the limitation of
PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords(). All or nothing, either builtin function
didn't support keyword arguments, or it supported passing by keyword for
all arguments.
But now it is possible to support passing by keyword only the part of
parameters. I want to propose to deprecate badly designed keyword names
of builtins.
By the way, I read that "/" marker is unknown by almost all Python
developers, and [...] syntax should be preferred, but
inspect.signature() doesn't support this syntax. Maybe we should fix
signature() and use [...] format instead?
[...] is not Python syntax too. And it is orthogonal to positional-only
parameters. [...] doesn't mean that parameters are positional-only. They
can be passed by keyword, but just don't have default value. On other
side, mandatory parameters can be positional-only.
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