[Python-Dev] Very Strange Argument Handling Behavior (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Fri Apr 16 18:14:22 CEST 2010

On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 8:35 AM, Stefan Behnel <stefan_ml at behnel.de> wrote:

Guido van Rossum, 16.04.2010 16:33:

I am fine with declaring dict({}, **{1:3}) illegal, since after all it is abuse of the ** mechanism. It's a bit like letting keys like 'not-an-identifier' pass through, though, isn't it?

Not really. It's hard to imagine(*) an implementation that naturally can represent strings that look like identifiers but not other strings -- typically, "identifier-ness" must be explicitly checked. But it's easy to imagine an implementation that only allows strings and not other values.

(*) I didn't say impossible. I don't really care about any counter-examples you may come up with -- in practice they don't matter. But the type does matter in practice.

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

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