Serhiy Storchaka ran into a ticklish problem with Argument Clinic and inspect.Signature information for builtins.

Consider pattern_match() in Modules/_sre.c. This implements the match method on a pattern object; in other words, re.compile().match(). The third parameter, endpos, defaults to PY_SSIZE_T_MAX in C. What should inspect.Signature() report as the default value for endpos? And how should it get that value?

Before you answer, consider how inspect.Signature works for builtins.
Argument Clinic hides a signature for the function as the first line of the docstring; the initialization of the code object strips that off and puts it in a separate member called __text_signature__.
inspect.Signature pulls that out string and passes it in to ast.parse, then walks the tree it gets back, pulls out the arguments and their default values and goes on from there.

We can't turn PY_SSIZE_T_MAX into an integer at Argument Clinic preprocessing time, because this could be done on a completely different architecture than the computer where Python is running. We can't stuff it in at compile time because the macro could devolve into an arbitrary expression (with | or + or something) so while that might work here that's not a general solution. We can't do it at runtime becuase the docstring is a static string.

The best solution seems to be: allow simple symbolic constants as default values. For example, for endpos we'd use sys.maxsize. The code in inspect.Signature would have to support getting an Attribute node, and look up the first field ("sys" in this case) in sys.modules. You could then specify PY_SSIZE_T_MAX as the default for generated C code, and life would be a dream.

I've posted a prototype patch on the tracker:

http://bugs.python.org/issue20144

It need tests and such but I think the basic technology is fine.

The thing is, I feel like this is borderline between bug fix and new feature. But without adding this, we would make a lot of the Argument Clinic conversions pretty messy. So I want to check it in. I just don't want to piss everybody off in the process.

Can you guys live with this?

/arry

p.s.

For what it's worth, the documentation for match() dodges this problem by outright lying. It claims that the prototype for the function is:

 match(string[, pos[, endpos]])

which is a lie. pattern_match() parses its arguments by calling PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() with a format string of "O|nn". Which means, for example, you could call:

 match("abc", endpos=5)

The documentation suggests this is invalid but it works fine. So my feeling is, this is a legitimate problem, and those who came before me swept it under the rug.