Paul Prescod writes:

Michael Hudson wrote:

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At one point I was going to use the same bits as are used in the code.co_flags field, which was probably where the bitfield idea originated.

By "keyword arguments" do you mean e.g:

compile(source, file, start_symbol, generators=1, division=0)

? I think that would be mildly painful for the one use I had in mind (the additions to codeop), and also mildly painful to implement.

Sorry, could you elaborate on why this is painful to use and implement?

Well, I don't know in detail how keyword arguments work from the C side. Your suggestion turns a roughly 4 line change I knew exactly how to do into a 20-30 line change I'd have to work on. I only said "mildly painful". The awkwardness of use would just mean using **, yes.

Considering the availability of **args, the code above looks to me like syntactic sugar for the code below:

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compile(source, file, start_symbol, {'generators':1, 'division':0})

Well yes, but I think the latter is closer to what one means, which is to say passing a (i.e. one) set of options.

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would be better from my point of view. I think this is a bit of a propeller-heads-only feature, to be honest, so I'm not that inclined to worry aobut the API.

I would just like to see an end to the convention of using bitfields in Python everywhere. You're just my latest target.

Fair enough. I've probably been corrupted by C on this one.

Python is not a really great bit-manipulation language!

<aside>Augmented assignment helps a *lot* here!</aside> At any rate, the fact that I'd temporarily forgotten about the existence of Jython is the more serious blunder... Cheers, M. -- . <- the point your article -> . |------------------------- a long way ------------------------| -- Cristophe Rhodes, ucam.chat