Larry Hastings added the comment: The main thing for me isn't that the function and its documentation-pseudocode are in sync (though in the long run this is desirable). What's important to me is that the function have a sensible, relevant signature in Python. There was simply no way to express the "times argument behaves differently when passed in by position vs. by argument" semantics in a signature.
I agree the new implementation is an improvement. But there's still no way to represent repeat's signature in Python. This is because "times" is an optional argument without a valid default value. It should always hold true that calling a function and explicitly passing in an optional argument's default value should behave identically to not specifying that argument. But there's no value I can pass in to "times" that results in the same behavior as not passing in "times". That's why I prefer the "times=None" approach. At some point I expect to get "nullable ints" into Argument Clinic (see #20341 ). Once that's in, I propose we convert itertools.repeat to work with Argument Clinic, as follows: * We use a nullable int for the "times" parameter. * The "times" parameter would have a default of None. * If times=None, repeat would repeat forever. repeat would then have an accurate signature. Raymond: does that sound reasonable? ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue19145> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
