> On 13 Sep 2018, at 21:34, Michael Selik <m...@selik.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Sep 13, 2018 at 11:35 AM Anders Hovmöller <bo...@killingar.net
> <mailto:bo...@killingar.net>> wrote:
>> Using keyword arguments is not painful. It's ugly in some unusual cases,
>> such as creating helper functions with nearly the same signature.
>
> It’s more painful than positional. To me the fact that everyone who works on
> code bases that are of non-trivial size see positional arguments being used
> for calls with more than 3 arguments is a pretty obvious proof.
>
> Looking through my recent code, I find I rarely call functions passing more
> than 3 arguments, unless using * or ** unpacking. This might be part of the
> difference in our styles.
I wrote a script so you can get a list of them all in big code bases without
looking through the code randomly.
https://gist.github.com/boxed/e60e3e19967385dc2c7f0de483723502
<https://gist.github.com/boxed/e60e3e19967385dc2c7f0de483723502>
>
> I feel this pain daily. You aren’t me so you can’t say if I feel this or not.
>
> Yes, of course. Pain is subjective. Are you aware that changing Python syntax
> is painful for not only the implementers, but also the users?
Let’s not exaggerate here. I’ve already implemented my original proposed
syntax, and I’m pretty sure the =foo syntax is similarly easy (if not easier!)
to implement. It took me something like one hour and I haven’t coded C for 20
years, 7 years if you count C++, and I’ve never looked at the CPython code base
before. It’s not that painful to implement.
As for users I don’t buy that argument much either. We aren’t optimizing for
not changing the language just to make people not learn new things. See
f-strings, assignment expressions, new except syntax, matrix multiplication
operator. We are optimizing for the value of python. Or, that’s how I see it
anyway.
/ Anders
_______________________________________________
Python-ideas mailing list
Python-ideas@python.org
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas
Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
