[Python-ideas] Positional-only parameters

[Serhiy Storchaka]

On 28.02.17 23:17, Victor Stinner wrote:
> My question is: would it make sense to implement this feature in
> Python directly? If yes, what should be the syntax? Use "/" marker?
> Use the @positional() decorator?

I'm strongly +1 for supporting positional-only parameters. The main 
benefit to me is that this allows to declare functions that takes 
arbitrary keyword arguments like Formatter.format() or 
MutableMapping.update(). Now we can't use even the "self" parameter and 
need to use a trick with parsing *args manually. This harms clearness 
and performance.

The problem with the "/" marker is that it looks ugly. There was an 
excuse for the "*" marker -- it came from omitting the name in "*args". 
The "*" prefix itself means an iterable unpacking, but "/" is not used 
neither as prefix nor suffix.

> Do you see concrete cases where it's a deliberate choice to deny
> passing arguments as keywords?

dict.__init__(), dict.update(), partial.__new__() and partial.__call__() 
are obvious examples. There are others.

And there was performance reason. Just making the function supporting 
keyword arguments added an overhead even to calls with only positional 
arguments. This was changed recently, but I didn't checked whether some 
overhead is left.

> Don't you like writing int(x="123") instead of int("123")? :-) (I know
> that Serhiy Storshake hates the name of the "x" parameter of the int
> constructor ;-))

I believe weird names like "x" was added when the support of "base" 
keyword was added due to the limitation of 
PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords(). All or nothing, either builtin function 
didn't support keyword arguments, or it supported passing by keyword for 
all arguments.

But now it is possible to support passing by keyword only the part of 
parameters. I want to propose to deprecate badly designed keyword names 
of builtins.

> By the way, I read that "/" marker is unknown by almost all Python
> developers, and [...] syntax should be preferred, but
> inspect.signature() doesn't support this syntax. Maybe we should fix
> signature() and use [...] format instead?

[...] is not Python syntax too. And it is orthogonal to positional-only 
parameters. [...] doesn't mean that parameters are positional-only. They 
can be passed by keyword, but just don't have default value. On other 
side, mandatory parameters can be positional-only.