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July 2008

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Proposal: don't nest optional brackets
by A.M. Kuchling Sept. 26, 2008

Sept. 26, 2008

To show a series of optional parameters, currently we nest square brackets. http://docs.python.org/dev/library/warnings.html#warnings.filterwarnings warnings.filterwarnings(action[, message[, category[, module[, lineno[, append]]]]]) My proposal is that we drop the nesting and write this as: warnings.filterwarnings(action [, message, category, module, lineno, append]) Currently the stylesheets make the brackets very big and dark, so I've also added a space before the bracket. This change means we'd lose the ability to show when two optional arguments must be supplied at the same time, which could currently be written like this: warnings.filterwarnings(action[, message, category[, module]]) In this hypothetical example, if you supply 'message' you must also supply 'category'. But I think that for most functions, you can supply each optional argument or not; you rarely need to supply two optional arguments that are tied in this way, and we can handle such cases by adding a sentence such as "Both message and category parameters must be supplied." A few places (difflib, doctest, probably others) use this format: .. function:: context_diff(a, b[, fromfile][, tofile][, fromfiledate][, tofiledate][, n][, lineterm]) It's better than the nested version -- at least it avoids the ]]]]]) at the end -- but I think having a single set of square brackets also works and reduces the symbolic noise further. .. function:: context_diff(a, b [, fromfile, tofile, fromfiledate, tofiledate, n, lineterm]) The brackets are large enough that I think this would still be quite readable; it doesn't seem likely that readers will miss that these parameters are optional. What does everyone think? --amk

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