Revisiting a four-month-old discussion:
On 03/19/2013 11:00 AM, Larry Hastings wrote:
As for handling optional argument groups, my gut feeling is that we're
better off not leaking it out of Argument Clinic--don't expose it in
this string we're talking about, and don't add support for it in the
inspect.Parameter object. I'm not going to debate range(), the syntax
of which predates one of our release managers. But I suggest option
groups are simply a misfeature of the curses module. There are some
other possible uses in builtins (I forgot to dig those out this
evening) but so far we're talking adding complexity to an array of
technologies (this representation, the parser, the Parameter object)
to support a handful of uses of something we shouldn't have done in
the first place, for consumers who I think won't care and won't
appreciate the added conceptual complexity.
I'm sad to say I've just about changed my mind on this.
This is what help(os.stat) looks like in my dev branch for Argument Clinic:
>>> help(os.stat)
Help on built-in function stat in module posix:
stat(...)
os.stat(path, *, dir_fd=None, follow_symlinks=True)
...
Argument Clinic added the line starting with "os.stat(path, ". pydoc
generated the "stat(...)" line. It doesn't have any info because of the
lack of introspection information.
Once builtins have introspection information, pydoc can do a better job,
and Argument Clinic can stop generating its redundant prototype line.
But if pydoc doesn't have argument group information, it won't be able
to tell where one group ends and the next begins, and it won't be able
to render the prototype for the help text correctly. I fear misleading
text is even worse than no text at all.
I also suggest that fancy editors (PyCharm etc) want as much information
as we can give them. If we give them argument group information, they
can flag malformed calls (e.g. "there's no way to legally call this
function with exactly three arguments").
I therefore have two credible consumers of this information. That's
enough for me: I propose we amend the Parameter object to add option
group information for positional-only parameters.
//arry/
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