[Python-Dev] repeated keyword arguments

[Jeff Hall]

That's all fine and good but in this case there may be "stealth errors". If
the user/programmer is expecting the first value to hold but instead

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 7:03 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 2:54 PM, Fred Drake <fdrake at acm.org> wrote:
> > On Jun 27, 2008, at 5:23 PM, Benjamin Peterson wrote:
> >>
> >> I think code that uses this is probably already quite broken in some
> >> fundamental way and putting the fix in 2.5 isn't much of a risk.
> >
> > I suspect the risk has more to do with breaking something else in Python
> > than in breaking 3rd-party code in this case.
> >
> > I think it should be fixed for 2.5 as well, myself.
>
> Let me clarify why I want to be so careful with this.
>
> If there is code that was expected to work but due to a bug in our
> code raises an exception, it's generally safe to fix this: people who
> ran into the issue found that their code didn't work, used a
> work-around, and that's the end of the story.
>
> But if there is code that was expected to *break* but due to a bug in
> our code *doesn't* raise an exception, people can very well have
> harmless occurrences of such code, and never noticed. Maybe their code
> is "broken" in the sense that it doesn't produce the correct result,
> but it may well be in a "don't care" way -- but if an upgrade suddenly
> starts raising the exception, they are likely to get unhandled
> exceptions where before they had none. This is particularly annoying
> when the author of the program that breaks is not the user of the
> program, to whose machine the upgrade was applied.
>
> In such cases I think it's better not to introduce new exceptions in
> point-point releases.
>
> --
> --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/<http://www.python.org/%7Eguido/>
> )
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