On May 4, 7:54 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Alex Martelli) wrote: > Michael <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Thus, whenever I need to pass information to a function, I use default > > arguments now. Is there any reason not to do this other than the fact > > that it is a bit more typing? > > You're giving your functions a signature that's different from the one > you expect it to be called with, and so making it impossible for the > Python runtime to diagnose certain errors on the caller's part. ... > The miniscule "optimization" of giving a function an argument it's not > _meant_ to have somewhat breaks this part of the "Zen of Python", and > thus I consider it somewhat unclean.
That is a pretty good reason in some contexts. Usually, the arguments I pass are values that the user might like to change, so the kwarg method often serves an explicit purpose allowing parameters to be modified, but I can easily imagine cases where the extra arguments should really not be there. I still like explicitly stating the dependencies of a function, but I suppose I could do that with decorators. Thanks, Michael. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
