On Sat, Dec 04, 2021 at 11:39:00PM -0500, David Mertz, Ph.D. wrote: > Wow! That's an even bigger teaching nightmare than I envisioned in my > prior post. Nine (3x3) different kinds of parameters is already too big of > a cognitive burden. Doubling that to 18 kinds makes me shudder. I admit I > sort of blocked out the positional-only defaults thing.
How do you get nine in the first place? Putting aside *args and **kwargs, the existing parameter matrix is either 3x2 or 3x2x∞ depending on whether you include types as part of the matrix. There are three calling conventions for parameters: - positional only - positional or keyword - keyword only and currently two states: - no default - default which makes 3x2 = 6, not 9. Adding a distinction between early and late defaults would make it 3x3=9, not 18. But surely you don't teach those six (or nine) permutations as *independent* features to be learned by rote as separate concepts? Of course when you enumerate through all the possibilities, you get six seperate choices (positional only with no default, etc), but I would hope you aren't teaching them as six independent concepts! The calling convention and the presence of a default are concepts which are orthogonal to each other, so we need only teach them as two choices: - choose a calling convention (and by all means leave out positional only in an introductory course for beginners); - choose whether or not to supply a default. If the PEP is accepted, it doesn't double the number of choices. It just adds one more: - choose between no default, early default or late default. -- Steve _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/K4GMDFOUJXN6XJI2LSGVFCOWG4VMWMNA/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
