Important consideration: Would the default value be typechecked or
not? (i.e. Does something like `float(s, {})` raise TypeError?)
It's not uncommon to use None as the result value when the input is
invalid, but not typechecking would then leave the door open to
strangeness like my example.
Or would None just be inelegantly special-cased, or...?
This could be one of those instances where Python is better off
leaving people to write their own short one-off functions to get the
/exact/ behavior desired in their individual circumstances.

I would suggest not checking type for exactly that reason. One-off functions are fine if they are one-off, but most cases where this behaviour is needed the one-off function is exactly the same is every case.

I don't think David is arguing for the default behavior to change -- merely that you get a dict.get style default. Kinda similar to getattr/2 raising AttributeError, and getattr/3 returning the default value.

Yes, dict.get is exactly the sort of thing I was going for. I think that there are also a few other methods dotted throughout the stdlib that have this an optional "default" argument like this, so this isn't really a new idea, it's only new in as it applies to int and float.

pv = float(ln['PV']) if ln['PV'] else None
pv = float(ln['PV'], default=None)

I wouldn't implement it this way because of the problems already pointed out. I would use a try statement (as in my first example), which would be more robust, but which cannot be written as a one-liner. If you were to write your example in a series of try statements, it would end up four times longer and much less readable!