Oliver Smith added the comment: The term "optional arguments" is a poorly formed adjectival suffix of "option". What it's trying to say is "these are kwargs" rather than "these arguments are not compulsory". I ran into this issue with 3.4 and was looking to file a simple change request: In early DOS/Linux days we called these "switches". I suggest we simply change the default wording from "optional arguments" to "switches". ---------- nosy: +Oliver.Smith Added file: http://bugs.python.org/file36528/parrot.py _______________________________________ Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue9694> _______________________________________