On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 10:09 AM, Yury Selivanov <yselivanov.ml@gmail.com> wrote:
 
There is a very common pattern for creating optional arguments
when you can't use None:



It's a bit annoying to create this marker objects, and also,
if you try to render a signature of such function, you'll get
something like:

"(*, arg1='spam', arg3=None, arg4=<object object at 0x104be7080>)"

What if we add a standard marker for this use-case:
functools.optional or inspect.Parameter.optional?


There is already a singleton which works very well for this use case:

def foo(*, arg1='spam', arg3=None, arg4=NotImplemented):
     if arg4 is NotImplemented:
         # caller didn't pass *anything* for arg4
     else:
         # caller did pass some (maybe None) value for arg4

It is  already defined, and reads like sensible English.