Re: [Python-ideas] partial with skipped arguments

On 4/22/07, Calvin Spealman wrote:

On 4/22/07, Steven Bethard wrote:

...

On 4/21/07, Calvin Spealman wrote:

...

I often wish you could bind to arguments in a partial out of order, skipping some positionals. The solution I came up with is a singleton object located as an attribute of the partial function itself and used like this:

def foo(a, b): return a / b pf = partial(foo, partial.skip, 2) assert pf(1.0) == 0.5

The other way I've seen this proposed is as::

rpartial(foo, 2)

In this particular situation, you could also just write::

partial(foo, b=2)

Relying on the names of position arguments is not always a good idea, of course. Also, it doesn't work at all with builtin (and extension?) functions. The design is a little different, but I like it. Also, the rpartial idea just creates multiple names for essentially the same thing and still doesn't allow for skipping middle arguments or specify only middle arguments, etc. I'd like to write a patch, if it would be considered.

Well, I can pretty much guarantee you'll get the two responses above, so if you post a patch, make sure you let python-dev know that you've already considered these options and don't see them as satisfactory. Your best bet of convincing people is probably to find a few real-world use cases and post the corresponding code. Steve -- I'm not *in*-sane. Indeed, I am so far *out* of sane that you appear a tiny blip on the distant coast of sanity. --- Bucky Katt, Get Fuzzy