[Python-ideas] Boolean parameters guidelines

[Bar Harel]

+1 on Steven D'Aprano's suggestion (And thus *Nick's* too).

I have seen *way* too many complicated functions with lots of booleans that
create an ugly 20 lines function call.
I agree that splitting into 2 if possible is a good idea, and in the cases
it's not, requesting keyword only arguments
is a great solution.

I do think though that in case of many possible options, using IntEnums and
OR operators is the preferable method,
unlike open() that uses a string, but that's again just a private opinion.

Huge +1.


On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 8:58 PM Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:

> On Sun, May 8, 2016 at 6:08 AM, Eric V. Smith <eric at trueblade.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> Wouldn't that be "for every (or almost every) call-site"?
>
>
> "most call sites" would be fine. The common use case matters, it's not
> that hard to conditionally call a different function, as long as that's the
> uncommon use-case.
>
> The other key here is that even if a boolean flag does essentially select
> between two different function, there are times where there is more than
> one such boolean flag for a single function, so you end up with 2**n
> "different" functions -- in this case, probably better to just use the
> flags and have one calling point.
>
> -CHB
>
>
>
> --
>
> Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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