The docstring of inspect.Parameter indicates the "default" and "annotation" attributes are not set if the parameter does not have, respectively, a default value and an annotation, and that the "kind" attribute is a string. But in fact, the "default" and "annotation" attributes are set to "inspect._empty (== Parameter.empty)" in that case, and the "kind" attribute has type "_ParameterKind" (essentially a hand-written equivalent of IntEnum). I suggest to correct the docstring accordingly, and to replace the implementation of _ParameterKind by a proper IntEnum (if full backwards compatibility is required), or even just by Enum (which makes a bit more sense, as the fact that _ParameterKind is a subclass of int doesn't seem to be documented anywhere). Antony