On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 8:35 AM, Gregory, Matthew
<matt.greg...@oregonstate.edu> wrote:
> Thanks for your reply. I do understand all the different ways parameters can
> be passed and realize that it's up to me to choose that signature. But,
> mostly, I wanted advice on how to make this signature as intuitive as
> possible to a user. So, from my earlier example, a signature with positional
> args like this is a bad idea:
>
> class Envelope:
> def __init__(x_min, y_max, cell_size, *args):
> ...
>
> # are args 3 and 4 rows and columns or x_max, y_min?
> e = Envelope(10, 20, 1, 30, 10)
Don't forget "self".
This signature seems okay to me.
> so I know at least the last two args should probably be keywords, but a
> signature like this is somewhat confusing to me as well because it's not
> immediately clear to me what the first three parameters are by looking at the
> *call* (obviously by looking at the method you can figure it out).
>
> def __init__(x_min, y_max, cell_size, **kwargs):
> e = Envelope(10, 20, 1, n_cols=30, n_rows=10)
> e = Envelope(10, 20, 1, x_max=30, y_min=10)
>
> So I know I'm getting around to answering my own question, but the clearest
> way to me was to provide all keyword args. I just didn't know if this was
> too verbose from a user's standpoint. Really just a stylistic question that
> might be best left to the individual.
In my experience, I've always defined explicit arguments and keyword arguments
for constructors and use **kwargs for anything that can be specified as optional
but have defaults. eg:
class Foo(object)
def __init__(self, a, b, c, x=1, **kwargs):
super(Foo, self).__init__()
self.a = a
self.b = b
self.c = c
self.x = x
self.y = kwargs.get("y", None)
cheers
James
--
-- James Mills
--
-- "Problems are solved by method"
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