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Revisiting a four-month-old discussion:<br>
<br>
On 03/19/2013 11:00 AM, Larry Hastings wrote:<br>
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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.<br>
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<br>
I'm sad to say I've just about changed my mind on this.<br>
<br>
This is what help(os.stat) looks like in my dev branch for Argument
Clinic:<br>
<blockquote><tt>>>> help(os.stat)<br>
Help on built-in function stat in module posix:<br>
<br>
stat(...)<br>
os.stat(path, *, dir_fd=None, follow_symlinks=True)<br>
...<br>
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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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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").<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
<br>
<i>/arry</i><br>
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