[Python-Dev] PEP 3102: Keyword-only arguments (original) (raw)

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Mon May 1 19:25:16 CEST 2006

"Fredrik Lundh" <fredrik at pythonware.com> wrote in message news:e35a4q$c23$1 at sea.gmane.org...

which reminds me of the following little absurdity gem from the language reference:

The following identifiers are used as keywords of the language, and cannot be used as ordinary identifiers. They must be spelled exactly as written here: /.../ (maybe it's just me).

I am not sure of what you see as absurdity, as opposed to clumbsiness. Keywords are syntacticly indentifiers, but are reserved for predefined uses, and thus sematically are not identifiers. Perhaps 'ordinary indentifiers' should be replaced by 'names'. The second sentence is referring to case variations, and that could be more explicit. Before the elevation of None to reserved word status, one could have just added ", in lower case letters"

btw, talking about idioms used in the language reference, can any of the native speakers on this list explain if "A is a nicer way of spelling B" means that "A is preferred over B", [alternatives snipped]

Yes.

Terry Jan Reedy

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