On 2014-04-16, 1:29 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
TBH I think it's usually an anti-pattern when you have an API where the absence of a parameter is not equivalent to some default value. It makes wrapping such APIs awkward, e.g.
def logging_foo(*, arg1='something_other_than_spam', arg3=None, arg4=
): loging.info('calling foo(arg1=%r, arg3=%r, arg4=%r)', arg1, arg3, arg4) return foo(arg1=arg1, arg3=arg3, arg4=arg4)
Agree, wrapping is hard, but you can always use **kwargs. The pattern is sometimes useful for decorators (as Ryan Gonzalez shows in this thread). But basically, you need this when 'None' is a legitimate value for some optional argument, and you want users to pass explicitly. For instance, see inspect.Signature.replace method: http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/e4ee0b15cc4f/Lib/inspect.py#l2193 I'm not saying it's a very common thing to do, but sometimes you need this, and having the need of doing some ad hoc hacks is slightly annoying. Yury