docstringargs: Python module for setting up argparse

[Chris Angelico]

On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 2:33 PM, Paul Rubin <no.email at nospam.invalid> wrote:
> Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> writes:
>> @cmdline
>> def adduser(
>>         user: {cmdline: "Name of user to add", typing: str},
>>         password: {cmdline: "Password for the new user", typing: str}=""):
>>     """Add a new user"""
>
> In the case of just one decorator, the dictionary could be omitted.  The
> decorator function itself could have an annotation flagging it as a
> consumer of annotations, so that would make it easy to check if there
> was more than one.  In your example above, you'd also want a @typing
> decorator.

PEP 484 says that type hints don't need a decorator, but if it were
anything else, then yes, it'd need a second decorator. But what if one
of the annotation usages wants to be a dictionary? How can you elide
the outer dictionary and still recognize what's going on?

> In those particular cases, the decorators don't even need the annotation
> feature:
>
> @cmdline(name="Name of user to add", password="Password for the new user")
> @typing(name=str, password=str)
> def adduser(user, password):
>     """Add a new user"""
>     ...

And that's a completely different feature. It still has the advantage
that everything is right there in the function signature... but look
how easy it is to introduce bugs: you're inconsistent about whether
the first parameter is called "name" or "user". This is exactly why
annotations exist. Like decorators themselves, they reduce repetition
and thus bugs.

ChrisA