On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 3:41 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncogh...@gmail.com> wrote: > Yep - Guido has pointed out in a few different API design discussions > that a boolean flag that is almost always set to a literal True or False > is a good sign that there are two functions involved rather than just > one. There are exceptions to that guideline (e.g. the reverse argument > for sorted and list.sort), but they aren't common, and even when they do > crop up, making them keyword-only arguments is strongly recommended.
As you yourself previously noted -- "it is often better to use *args for the two positional arguments - it avoids accidental name conflicts between the positional arguments and arbitrary keyword arguments" -- kwargs may cause name conflicts. But I also agree, that the current proliferation of positional args is ugly. add_query_params_no_dups() would be suboptimal though, as there are currently three different ways to handle the duplicates: * allow duplicates everywhere (True), * remove duplicate *values* for the same key (False), * behave like dict.update -- remove duplicate *keys*, unless explicitly passed a list (None). (See the documentation at http://github.com/mrts/qparams/blob/bf1b29ad46f9d848d5609de6de0bfac1200da310/qparams.py ). Additionally, as proposed by Antoine Pitrou, removing keys could be implemented. It feels awkward to start a PEP for such a marginal feature, but clearly a couple of enlightened design decisions are required. _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
