[Python-ideas] Treat underscores specially in argument lists

[Devin Jeanpierre]

Our experiences differ, then. I've never seen arguments unused that
wasn't fairly justifiable and OK with me.

OTOH, I *have* seen code break because it renamed a parameter to
"unused_foo" instead of foo, and when the method was called with
foo=2... kablooie.

-1 on encouraging the antipattern of renaming your public interfaces
to indicate implementation details.

-- Devin

On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 11:58 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull
<stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
> Andrew Barnert writes:
>
>  > So anyway, what if you needed the index, but not the name or mode?
>  > You can't use *_ to get around that; you have to come up with two
>  > dummy names. That's a bit annoying.
>
> If there's one such function, I'd say "suck it up".  If there are two
> or more, hit it with a two-by-four and it will submit:
>
> def twobyfour (func):
>     def wrapper(real1, dummy1, real2, dummy2):
>         return func(real1, real2)
>     return wrapper
>
>  > >> Why are you ignoring *any* arguments?
>
> I wouldn't express the idea that way.  Obviously we're ignoring
> arguments because there's a caller that supplies them.
>
> Rather, I'd say "in my experience ignoring arguments means a badly
> designed API that should be refactored."  That's true in callbacks as
> well as in any other function.  Granted, sometimes you can't refactor,
> but I think more often than not ignoring arguments is a code smell and
> you can.
>
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