**kwargs?

[Francois De Serres]

Michael Hoffman wrote:

>Peter Hansen wrote:
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>>Francois De Serres wrote:
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>>>*args is documented in the Tutorial. I reckon **kwargs represents a 
>>>dictionary of arguments. But I don't quite get the semantics of **x. 
>>>Undefined length tuple of undefined length tuples? Are there other 
>>>practical use cases for ** (common enough please, I wish I was, but 
>>>I'm not a scientist).
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>>>
>>Where did you get "tuples of tuples" for **x ?
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>I would guess it is confusion from languages where unary * means 
>dereference and ** means double dereference.
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That was precisely my mistake.

>To the OP: I'm glad you have been reading the tutorial. If you have 
>further questions the reference manual is a good place to look:
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>http://docs.python.org/ref/function.html
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Now I see, there's a '**' token, which is not the same as two adjacents 
'*' tokens.

>Just as you can use a name other than self as the first argument to an 
>unbound method, you can call your *args and **kwargs *x and **y instead, 
>but they will still act just like *args and **kwargs.
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>The stars are magic, not the names.
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Thanks mucho!
F.