[Python-Dev] Rough idea for adding introspection information for builtins (original) (raw)

Ronald Oussoren ronaldoussoren at mac.com
Sun Jul 7 13:42:30 CEST 2013

On 7 Jul, 2013, at 13:35, Larry Hastings <larry at hastings.org> wrote:

On 07/07/2013 07:25 AM, Ronald Oussoren wrote: Signature objects use a name in angled brackets to indicate that a parameter is positional only, for example "input()". That might be an alternative to adding a "/" in the argument list in pydoc's output.

I wasn't aware that Signature objects currently had any support whatsoever for positional-only parameters. Yes, in theory they do, but in practice they have never seen one, because positional-only parameters only occur in builtins and Signature objects have no metadata for builtins. (The very problem Argument Clinic eventually hopes to solve!) Can you cite an example of this, so I may examine it?

I have a branch of PyObjC that uses this: <https://bitbucket.org/ronaldoussoren/pyobjc-3.0-unstable/overview>. That branch isn't quite stable yet, but does add a signature slot to objc.selector and objc.function (basicly methods of Cocoa classes and automaticly wrapped global functions), both of which only have positional-only arguments. With the patch for pydoc/inspect I mentioned earlier I can then generate somewhat useful documentation for Cocoa classes using pydoc.

A word of warning though: the PyObjC source code isn't the most approachable, the code that generates the Signature object is actually in python (callable_signature in pyobjc-core/Lib/objc/_callable_docstr.py)

Ronald

/arry

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