[Python-ideas] PEP for issue2292, "Missing *-unpacking generalizations"

[Joshua Landau]

On 6 July 2013 23:06, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 6, 2013 at 2:35 PM, Joshua Landau
> <joshua.landau.ws at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 6 July 2013 21:38, Jan Kaliszewski <zuo at chopin.edu.pl> wrote:
>>> Forbidding keyword arguments before *args in function calls does not seem so
>>> bad, but still it is a serious backwards incompatibility... And why would we
>>> actually want to forbid it?
>>
>> I included it because my understanding is that it was in the original patch.
>>
>> I'm not sure why anyone would want to forbid it, other than it being
>> easier to write the patch that way. Compatibility aside, I'm not sure
>> why anyone would want to keep it either, though.
>
> In this case, compatibility trumps everything, and we should keep it for sure.
>
> But even if we had a choice, my experience tells me that it's a good
> thing to keep, because nobody can remember the rules of what goes
> before what.

Then should we expand to allow arbitrary mixing of keyword and
positional arguments (which sounds reasonable if we want to allow
keyword arguments before *args, and also treat *args like any
positional argument)?