[Python-ideas] Keyword only argument on function call

[Jonathan Fine]

Steve wrote:

> With the usual disclaimer that I understand it will never be manditory
> to use this syntax, nevertheless I can see it leading to the "foolish
> consistency" quote from PEP 8.

>     "We have syntax to write shorter code, shorter code is better,
>     so if we want to be Pythonic we must design our functions to use
>     the same names for local variables as the functions we call."

>     -- hypothetical blog post, Stackoverflow answer,
>        opinionated tutorial, etc.

> I don't think this is a pattern we want to encourage.

Steve's "hypothetical blog post" is a pattern he doesn't like, and he
said that it's not a pattern we want to encourage. And he proceeds to
demolish this pattern, in the rest of his post.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

<quote>
The typical straw man argument creates the illusion of having
completely refuted or defeated an opponent's proposition through the
covert replacement of it with a different proposition (i.e., "stand up
a straw man") and the subsequent refutation of that false argument
("knock down a straw man") instead of the opponent's proposition.
</quote>

So what was the original proposition. I summarise from the original
post. It was to allow

     foo(*, a, b, c, d=3, e)

as a shorthand for

      foo(a=a, b=b, c=c, d=3, e=e)

And also that on two big code bases about 30% of all arguments would
benefit from this syntax. And also that it would create an incentive
for consistent naming across the code base.

To me, the "30% of all arguments" deserves more careful examination.
Does the proposal significant improve the reading and writing of this
code? And are there other, perhaps better, ways of improving this
code?

I'm very keen to dig into this. I'll start a new thread for this very topic.

-- 
Jonathan