[Python-Dev] A grammatical oddity: trailing commas in argument lists -- continuation (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Tue Dec 14 01:31:01 CET 2010

On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 5:39 AM, Mark Dickinson <dickinsm at gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 3:51 PM, R. David Murray <rdmurray at bitdance.com> wrote: > It seems like the status quo is fine. I wouldn't object to it being > made more consistent. I would object to removing the existing cases.

Same here, on all three counts. In one of the projects I'm currently working on, we've settled on a style that does quite a lot of: mything = Thing( foo = Foo(arg1, arg2, ...), bar = Bar(arg3, arg4, ...), ... ) and I've found the trailing comma very convenient during refactoring and API experimentation. (There's still good fun to be had arguing about the indentation of that closing parenthesis, though.)

Another valid use case that occurred to me is building up a string-keyed dictionary:

mapping = dict( x=1, y=2, z=3, )

So, on reflection, removing the existing cases where it is supported is certainly unreasonable, which makes the consistency argument that much stronger.

For the record, I reopened issue #9232 (noting the lack of consensus), and (as someone suggested on the tracker) changed the resolution on the other one to be as a duplicate of #9232.

Cheers, Nick.

P.S. As I noted in the logging discussion, my email access is going to be a bit sketchy for the next couple of weeks.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20101214/7100b7b1/attachment.html>

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list