I have a working implementation for a new syntax which would make using keyword
arguments a lot nicer. Wouldn't it be awesome if instead of:
foo(a=a, b=b, c=c, d=3, e=e)
we could just write:
foo(*, a, b, c, d=3, e)
and it would mean the exact same thing? This would not just be shorter but
would create an incentive for consistent naming across the code base.
So the idea is to generalize the * keyword only marker from function to also
have the same meaning at the call site: everything after * is a kwarg. With
this feature we can now simplify keyword arguments making them more readable
and concise. (This syntax does not conflict with existing Python code.)
The full PEP-style suggestion is here:
https://gist.github.com/boxed/f72221e7e77370be3e5703087c1ba54d
I have also written an analysis tool you can use on your code base to see what
kind of impact this suggestion might have. It's available at
https://gist.github.com/boxed/610b2ba73066c96e9781aed7c0c0b25c . The results
for django and twisted are posted as comments to the gist.
We've run this on our two big code bases at work (both around 250kloc excluding
comments and blank lines). The results show that ~30% of all arguments would
benefit from this syntax.
Me and my colleague Johan Lübcke have also written an implementation that is
available at: https://github.com/boxed/cpython
/ Anders Hovmöller
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