[Python-Dev] Keyword-only parameters (original) (raw)

Paul Sokolovsky pmiscml at gmail.com
Tue Apr 14 19:56:55 CEST 2015

Hello,

On Tue, 14 Apr 2015 13:40:40 -0400 "Eric V. Smith" <eric at trueblade.com> wrote:

I'm working on adding a numericowner parameter to some tarfile methods (http://bugs.python.org/issue23193),

In a review, Berker suggested making the parameter keyword-only. I agree that you'd likely never want to pass just "True", but that "numericowner=True" would be a better usage. But, I don't see a lot of keyword-only parameters being added to stdlib code.

Well, majority of stdlib is stable, why would somebody suddenly go and start adding some novelty to otherwise stable and consistent API? But newer parts of stdlib, e.g. asyncio, visibly overuse kw-only args.

Is there some position we've taken on this? Barring someone saying "stdlib APIs shouldn't contain keyword-only params", I'm inclined to make numericowner keyword-only.

Is there anything stopping me from making it keyword-only? Thanks. Eric.

-- Best regards, Paul mailto:pmiscml at gmail.com

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