[Python-Dev] Status of the Argument Clinic DSL

[Brett Cannon]

On Thu, 4 Aug 2016 at 09:14 Alexander Belopolsky <
alexander.belopolsky at gmail.com> wrote:

> What is the current status of the Argument Clinic DSL?  The clinic
> preprocessor was released [1] with Python 3.4 with a promise [2] "that
> signature metadata for programmatic introspection will be added to
> additional callables implemented in C as part of Python 3.4
> maintenance releases."  We are now close to 3.6 beta and clinic
> coverage in stdlib is sparse at best.  For example, the math module
> makes no use of the clinic (but interestingly a few methods in cmath
> do).  The documentation is very sparse as well.  While one would
> expect PEP 436 to serve as *the* documentation while clinic is being
> developed, but the PEP has the "Draft" status and has not been updated
> since 2013.  Furthermore, the 3.4 release notes contain a warning
> saying "The Argument Clinic PEP is not fully up to date with the state
> of the implementation."  It does not look like this situation has
> improved since.
>

I always read https://docs.python.org/3/howto/clinic.html as the
documentation and not the PEP.


>
> The practical question is: does it make sense to invest time in
> learning the clinic DSL and converting more modules (e.g. datetime) to
> it


Yes. Part of the issue is there was a big push to convert modules for the
3.4 release and some of us helped convert however many we can, but then
people stopped putting the time in to convert code a module at a time once
3.4 was released. Serhiy has actually been working on a patch to speed up
keyword parsing which will automatically be applied to code using Argument
Clinic: http://bugs.python.org/issue27574 .


> or it is likely that the whole approach will be revised in the
> future?
>
>
I don't see it being revised, but maybe Larry has something to say on the
matter.


> [1] http://bugs.python.org/issue16612
> [2]
> https://docs.python.org/3.6/whatsnew/3.4.html?highlight=clinic#pep-436-argument-clinic
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