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

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Sat Apr 17 04:47:05 CEST 2010

On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 2:56 PM, Raymond Hettinger <raymond.hettinger at gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 2:11 PM, Raymond Hettinger <raymond.hettinger at gmail.com> 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. ISTM that making it illegal costs cycles with giving any real benefit. Diasagree. The real benefit is better cross-implementation portability. Would hate for 100% of users will pay a performance penalty when most applications aren't abusing keyword dictionaries so they already work cross-platfrom. Isn't there anyway to make this a one-time check instead of a PyLint style validation check running on every invocation of a function or method using **kwds? Or perhaps there can be a switch or flag to enable developers to check for non-standard uses of **kwds.  That way, they can clean-up their programs but not make the end users pay for the checks every time they run an application that has already been cleaned-up.

Please stop worrying.

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

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