Is it explicitly specified?

Bjoern Schliessmann usenet-mail-0306.20.chr0n0ss at spamgourmet.com
Sun Feb 3 07:34:34 EST 2008


mario ruggier wrote:

> It may sometimes be useful to make use of the conceptual
> difference between these two cases, that is that in one case the
> user did not specify any key and in the other the user explicitly
> specified the key to be None.

Do you have an example where this might be useful?
 
> Is there any way to tell this difference from within the called
> function? And if so, would there be any strong reasons to not rely
> on this difference? 

IMHO, it's "magic".

> Would it be maybe a little abusive of what a keyword arg actually
> is? 

No, but you'd have to explain to users why it behaves like this. I
wouldn't expect this behaviour. If the function signature says the
default value for "key" is None, I expect it to behave the same no
matter if I leave out "key" or if I set it explicitly.

Regards,


Björn

-- 
BOFH excuse #307:

emissions from GSM-phones




More information about the Python-list mailing list