Chris Angelico writes:
On Sat, Dec 11, 2021 at 8:07 PM Stephen J. Turnbull <stephenjturnbull@gmail.com> wrote:
This isn't about your proposal, it's about more general syntax. Not everything being discussed is about your proposal, and I suspect one reason you have trouble figuring out what other people are talking about is that you persistently try to force everything into that context.
Yes, it's silly of me to think of everything in a PEP 671 thread as if it's about argument defaults. Carrying on.
Silly, no, I would say "human", but either way I believe it is impeding *your* understanding, and almost nobody else's. Of course, the *thread* is generally about argument defaults, but "everything" in it is not specifically about defaults. In *this* subthread Eric was arguing for waiting for a facility for *generic* deferral of expression evaluation, and I was trying (unsuccessfully) to see if your syntax for defaults could be extended to the more generic idea.[1] Elsewhere in the thread, you often ask about others' ideas for such a facility, instead of saying "that's off-topic, you have my proposal, let's keep discussion strictly to that" or alternatively, "nobody claims that's more than vaporware, I say now is better than never, nothing to see here, move on." In that sense, yes, you can treat everything in this thread as being about argument defaults by cutting short any other discussion (or just ignoring it). There's nothing wrong with doing that -- but you did not. Instead you talk about being confused, not understanding the suggested alternatives, and you ask about them. In that context, it's on you to try to channel others' thinking rather than demand that they channel your confusion. If you're not in *this* subthread to understand alternative ideas (again, *there is nothing wrong with ending this subthread here*), I have nothing further to say in it. If you are, you need to calm down and start asking questions that specify what you want to know rather than adding a question mark to a grunt as in
How?
Footnotes: [1] I think that's important because elsewhere I suggested that defaults for actual arguments are a sufficiently important use case to deserve separate syntax from the generic evaluation-deferring syntax if needed.