[Python-3000] Pronouncement on parameter lists (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Fri Apr 21 20:22:19 CEST 2006

On 4/21/06, Jim Jewett <jimjjewett at gmail.com> wrote:

On 4/21/06, Alex Martelli <aleaxit at gmail.com> wrote: > On 4/21/06, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

> > To prevent more abominations like this, let me pronounce that I now > > like the single-star syntax: > > def foo(a, b, *, x=1, y=2): ... > So, what will this syntax signify? If the single-star stands for > "arbitrary positional arguments", how will the body of foo access > them? Sorry if these have been well covered already, but I read back > through this thread and couldn't find them. No, *args stands for arbitrary positional arguments. The unadorned * stands for "anything after this must be passed as a keyword". It has not yet been specified what would happen to additional positional arguments that get passed in anyway. (Swallow or raise an Exception?)

It would be useless to swallow them (*ignored already lets you do that).

It has not yet been specified whether the keyword-only arguments must each have a default. Most proposals assume not, but then do ugly things to support that assumption. The above suggests

def foo(a, b=2, *, x=3, y=4): # OK def foo(a, b=2, *, x, y=4): # not yet decided

I first was gonna say "illegal of course" but on second though the feature of having required keyword args is sometimes useful; I believe I've coded such a signature myself once or twice out of **kwds and lots of checking.

FWIW Talin, if you're writing up a PEP for this, could I ask you to also specify a new introspection API? A function foo should have a magic attribute foo.signature which provides access to the argument names and defaults (and types if in the future we add argument declarations). signature objects should be copyable and mutable and the attribute should be assignable so that wrapping decorators can copy and modify the signature of the wrapped function onto the wrapper function (the latter is usually declared as *args, **kwds).

(Ideally the signature attribute on a bound method should return the unbound method's signature modified to remove 'self'.)

Oh, other standard function attributes probably all ought to be renamed from func_whatever to whatever. That applies to 'func_closure', 'func_code', 'func_defaults', 'func_dict', 'func_doc', 'func_globals', 'func_name'.

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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