[Python-ideas] keyword arguments everywhere (stdlib) (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Fri Mar 2 23:46:43 CET 2012

On Fri, Mar 2, 2012 at 2:49 PM, Ethan Furman <ethan at stoneleaf.us> wrote:

Terry Reedy wrote:

On 3/2/2012 3:32 PM, Ethan Furman wrote:

Guido van Rossum wrote:

I would actually like to see a syntactic feature to state that an argument cannot be given as a keyword argument (just as we already added syntax to state that it must be a keyword). I think this is what we need. I see the problem as being that a) C and Python functions work differently, and b) the doc does not -- and should not -- specify the implementation. One solution is to make all C functions work like Python functions. The other is to allow Python functions to work like C functions. Given the reasonable opposition to the first, we need the second. So something like: def ord(char, ?): def split(self, char, ?, count) def canary(breed, ?, color, wingspan, *, name) That is probably better than using '$' or directly tagging the names. I chose '?' because it has some similarity to an incompletely-drawn 'p', and also because it suggests a sort of vagueness, as in not being able to specify the name of the argument. I do not know if it is the best possible way, and am looking forward to other ideas.

I'd rather not start using a new punctuation character for this one very limited purpose; it might prevent us from using ? for some other more generic purpose in the future.

Alternative proposal: how about using '/' ? It's kind of the opposite of '*' which means "keyword argument", and '/' is not a new character.

-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

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