[Python-ideas] New 3.x restriction on number of keyword arguments

[Cesare Di Mauro]

2010/10/24 Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz>

> Cesare Di Mauro wrote:
>
>> I think that having max 255 args and 255 kwargs is a good and reasonable
>> limit which we can live on, and helps the virtual machine implementation
>>
>
> Is there any corresponding limit to the number of arguments to
>  tuple and dict constructor?


AFAIK there's no such limit. However, I'll use BUILD_TUPLE and BUILD_MAP
opcodes for such purpose, because they are faster.


> If not, the limit could perhaps be
> circumvented without changing the VM by having the compiler
> convert calls with large numbers of args into code that builds
> an appropriate tuple and dict and makes a *args/**kwds call.
>
> --
> Greg


I greatly prefer this solution, but it's a bit more complicated when there
are *arg and/or **kwargs special arguments.

If we have > 255 args and *args is defined, we need to:
1) emit BUILD_TUPLE after pushed the regular arguments
2) emit LOAD_GLOBAL("tuple")
3) push *args
4) emit CALL_FUNCTION(1) to convert *args to a tuple
5) emit BINARY_ADD to append *args to the regular arguments
6) emit CALL_FUNCTION_VAR

If we have > 255 kwargs and **kwargs defined, we need to:
1) emit BUILD_MAP after pushed the regular keyword arguments
2) emit LOAD_ATTR("update")
3) push **kwargs
4) emit CALL_FUNCTION(1) to update the regular keyword arguments with the
ones in **kwargs
5) emit CALL_FUNCTION_KW

And, finally, combining all the above in the worst case.

But, as I said, I prefer this one to handle "complex" cases instead of
changing the VM slowing the common ones.

Cesare
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