Help understanding the decisions *behind* python?

greg greg at cosc.canterbury.ac.nz
Mon Aug 3 19:35:12 EDT 2009


John Nagle wrote:
> Mesa used tuples for subroutine arguments in a very straightforward
> way.  Every function took one tuple as an argument
> 
>    Python doesn't go that far.

I believe that a very early version of Python did do
something like that, but it was found to be a bad idea,
because there was an ambiguity between multiple args and
a single arg that happened to be a tuple.

This was before keyword arguments existed -- they would
have been hard to incorporate into the old scheme.

-- 
Greg



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