On 5 August 2016 at 09:12, Larry Hastings <la...@hastings.org> wrote: > / is the delimiter between positional-only parameters and > positional-or-keyword arguments. It's not actual Python syntax, but Guido > said (somewhere) that *if* Python ever sprouted a syntax for positional-only > parameters, that was as good a delimiter as any. I think he picked it > because / is the inverse of *.
I was thinking Guido picked the "/" symbol when we were discussing the Argument Clinic DSL at PyCon 2014 and you had also been working on https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0457/ However, re-reading the latter shows it dates back earlier than that: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0457/#guido > If you have more questions about __text_signature__, I recommend reading the > implementation of inspect.signature, since that's the one and only consumer > of it. I occasionally wonder if we should document the "/" notation in https://docs.python.org/3/library/inspect.html#introspecting-callables-with-the-signature-object as it can sometimes show up in the text representation of signature objects: >>> print(inspect.signature(format)) (value, format_spec='', /) Likewise for describing the option of using __text_signature__ to override the default inspect.signature() output (and perhaps adding a public "inspect.Signature.from_text" alternate constructor at the same time). However, either notion is a bit tricky while PEP 457 is still in draft rather than accepted - even if it's "just" a syntax for overriding inspect.signature, we'd still be effectively locking this in as *the* syntax for positional-only arguments (if they're ever added) Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
