[Python-Dev] [Python-ideas] Proposed addtion to urllib.parse in 3.1 (and urlparse in 2.7) (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Sat Apr 18 14:41:14 CEST 2009

Steven Bethard wrote:

On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 1:14 PM, Mart Sõmermaa <mrts.pydev at gmail.com> wrote:

A default behaviour should be found that works according to most user's expectations so that they don't need to use the positional arguments generally. I believe the usual Python approach here is to have two variants of the function, addqueryparams and addqueryparamsnodups (or whatever you want to name them). That way the flag parameter is "named" right in the function name.

Yep - Guido has pointed out in a few different API design discussions that a boolean flag that is almost always set to a literal True or False is a good sign that there are two functions involved rather than just one. There are exceptions to that guideline (e.g. the reverse argument for sorted and list.sort), but they aren't common, and even when they do crop up, making them keyword-only arguments is strongly recommended.

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia

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