[Python-Dev] PEP487: Simpler customization of class creation

[Martin Teichmann]

> This is an area of exceeding subtlety (and also not very well
> documented/specified, probably). I'd worry that changing anything here
> might break some code. When a metaclass overrides neither __init__ nor
> __new__, keyword args will not work because type.__init__ forbids
> them. However when a metaclass overrides them and calls them using
> super(), it's quite possible that someone ended up calling
> super().__init__() with three positional args but super().__new__()
> with keyword args, since the call sites are distinct (in the overrides
> for __init__ and __new__ respectively).
>
> What's your argument for changing this, apart from a desire for more regularity?

The implementation gets much simpler if __new__ doesn't take keyword
arguments. It's simply that if it does, I have to filter out __new__'s
three arguments.
That's easily done in Python, unfortunately not so much in C.

So we have two options: either type.__new__ is limited to accepting positional
arguments only, possibly breaking some code, but which could be changed
easily. This leads to a pretty simple implementation: pass over
keyword arguments
to __init_subclass__, that's it.

The other option is: filter out name, bases and dict from the keyword arguments
If people think that backwards compatibility is that important, I
could do that. But
that just leaves quite some code in places where there is already a lot of
complicated code.

Nick proposed a compromise, just don't filter for name, bases and dict, and
pass them over to __init_subclass__. Then the default implementation of
__init_subclass__ must support those three keyword arguments and do
nothing with them.

I'm fine with all three solutions, although I have a preference for the first.
I think passing keyword arguments to type.__new__ is already really rare
and if it does exist, it's super easy to fix.

> I'm confused. In the above example it would seem that the keyword args
> {'a': 1, 'b': 2} are passed right on to super9).__init_subclass__().
> Do you mean that it ignores all keyword args? Or that it has no
> positional args? (Both of which would be consistent with the example.)

The example is just wrong. I'll fix it.

> Can you state exactly at which point during class initialization
> __init_class__() is called? (Surely by now, having implemented it, you
> know exactly where. :-)

Further down in the PEP I give the exact

> [This is as far as I got reviewing when the weekend activities
> interrupted me. In the light of ongoing discussion I'm posting this
> now -- I'll continue later.]

I hope you had a good weekend not thinking too much about
metaclasses...

Greetings

Martin