I disagree. Those are examples of people being used to *positional arguments* and this expecting that order to carry over. I don’t think that’s a good argument because it presupposes that a habit of positional arguments is good.

If 99% of existing code uses: pd.read_csv(fname, parse_dates=True, day_first=True) In preference to: pd.read_csv(fname, day_first=True, parse_dates=True) It seems pretty absurd to say that readability isn't harmed by someone choosing the "non-standard" order. Of course it still works the same for the library; but it's not the same for humans reading the code. There is one thing: my proposal wouldn’t result in a NameError at the

eval() call. You tried it out in a console but didn’t think about the scoping properly. For your suggestion to work you have to copy paste that helper function into the code at all scopes you want to use it.

This is just wrong. Assuming there is no 'd' available in the current scope, what could this POSSIBLY do other than raise a NameError: function(a=77, *, b, d) My little utility function decided to convert the NameError into a None value for the missing variable; but I mentioned that I'm not sure whether that's more useful behavior, and I'm not much attached to one or the other. function(a=77, **use('b d')) To make that helper function work you need to grab the stack frame and

extract the variables from there. You could absolutely do that though. That’s pretty evil though.

Nope, there's absolutely no need to poke into the stack frame. It's just a regular closure over any variables that might exist in surrounding scopes. *Exactly* the same thing that your proposal would have to do. It makes absolutely no difference how deeply or shallowly nested the call to `use()` might be... A name like `d` simply is or is not available. Since the utility function doesn't have its own locals or formal parameters, nothing is changed by being one level deeper.[*] [*] Actually, that's not true. My implementation potentially steps on the three names `names`, `name` and `kws`. Perhaps those should be called `__names`, `__name`, and `__kws` to avoid that issue. If so, that's an easy change. -- Keeping medicines from the bloodstreams of the sick; food from the bellies of the hungry; books from the hands of the uneducated; technology from the underdeveloped; and putting advocates of freedom in prisons. Intellectual property is to the 21st century what the slave trade was to the 16th.