Simple pychecker question

[Neal Norwitz]

On Sun, 09 Jun 2002 03:04:09 -0400, Peter Hansen wrote:

> Neal Norwitz wrote:
>> 
>> I personally think that superfluous use of named args are bad, but that
>> the feature is good when used properly.  For example, with your code
>> above, calling f(f=2) would be better written f(2).  However for
>> Tkinter, named args can be useful when there are a bunch of parameters
>> and you only want to use the last.
> 
> For a routine named and structured like this:
> 
>   def transmit(data, timeout=1.0):
> 
> which of the following would you say was the better call in some code
> that might be remote from that definition above?
> 
> 1.  transmit('this is a string', 5)
> 
> 2.  transmit('this is a string', timeout=5)
> 
> My point: named arguments can increase readability and maintainability.
> That's not superfluous, to me.

I agree that they can enhance readability.  With the example above, 
it's questionable, but that's my opinion.  Suppose the function was 
transmitWithTimeout()?  Or suppose the code looked like this:

	timeout = 5
	transmit('this is a string', timeout)

There really doesn't seem to be a right way, it just depends.

Neal