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On Wed, Mar 6, 2019 at 11:18 PM Brice Parent <contact@brice.xyz> wrote:
The major implication to such a modification of the Dict.update method, is that when you're using it with keyword arguments (by opposition to passing another dict/iterable as positional), you're making a small non-backward compatible change in that if in some code, someone was already using the keyword that would be chosing (here "on_collision"), their code would be broken by the new feature. Anyway, if the keyword is slected wisely, the collision case will almost never happen, and be quite easy to correct if it ever happened.
You can make it unlikely, yes, but I'd dispute "easy to correct". Let's suppose that someone had indeed used the chosen keyword (and remember, the more descriptive the argument name, the more likely that it'll be useful elsewhere and therefore have a collision). How would they discover this? If they're really lucky, there MIGHT be an exception (if on_collision accepts only a handful of keywords, and the collision isn't one of them), but if your new feature is sufficiently flexible, that might not happen. There'll just be incorrect behaviour. As APIs go, using specific keyword args at the same time as **kw is a bit odd. Consider: button_options.update(button_info, on_click=frobnicate, style="KDE", on_collision="replace") It's definitely not obvious which of those will end up in the dictionary and which won't. Big -1 from me on that change. ChrisA