The slash "/" as used in the documentation

[Jon Ribbens]

On 2019-02-10, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 2:21 AM Jon Ribbens <jon+usenet at unequivocal.eu> wrote:
>> On 2019-02-09, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
>> > '/' is no uglier than, and directly analogous to, and as easy to produce
>> > and comprehend, as '*'.  It was selected after considerable discussion
>> > of how to indicate that certain parameters are, at least in CPython,
>> > positional only.  The discussion of options included at least some of
>> > those given above.  It is very unlikely to go away or be changed.
>>
>> Ok, but what does it *mean*?
>
> It means "everything prior to this point is positional-only".
>
>> As an aside, how is 'math.sin' actually implemented? mathmodule.c
>> refers to the function 'math_sin' but that name is not defined
>> anywhere in the Python source code. I'm a bit mystified as to how
>> CPython manages to compile!
>
> A lot of those sorts of functions are hyperthin wrappers around the C
> math library. A bit of digging takes me to line 1176 of mathmodule.c
> (in my source tree; exact line number may vary), which uses the
> #define of FUNC1 from line 1032, and the actual code is up at line
> 876, with a good block comment.

Ah, it's using C preprocessor string concatenation to build the
function name, which is why grepping for 'math_sin' didn't find it.

Many thanks for your helpful answers.