[Just noticed this old conversation.]
On Jun 22, 2008, at 7:36 AM, Georg Brandl wrote:
I'm +0. I'd like to hear Fred's opinion since (I guess) he
introduced the
nested bracket notation. If he's okay with it, I'll write a script
that
converts the signatures in the whole documentation.
Hmm. I'm fairly certain I didn't create it, but at this point, I
might be mistaken.
The nested notation makes sense for optional arguments, especially
where keywords aren't supported. This is still the case for many of
the APIs written in C, and those cases often won't be changed due to
performance considerations. (Adding keyword support definitely slows
things down.)
For code implemented in Python, it's less of an issue, since the
keyword support is always there unless the author of the code went out
of the way to avoid it (using *args, for example). This happens, but
isn't very common.
But that's part of my reservation about this. With the nested
notation, it's possible to specify signatures that are different from
the implementation signatures. I think that's valuable still.
So I guess now someone will tell me this has already been changed, and
I missed it.
--sigh--
-Fred
--
Fred Drake <fdrake at acm.org>
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