The slash "/" as used in the documentation

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 2:49 AM Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Feb 9, 2019 at 1:19 PM Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
> >
> > This is the result of Python being a project of mostly unpaid volunteers.
> >
> > See my response in this thread explaining how '/' appears in help output
> > and IDLE calltips.  '/' only appears for CPython C-coded functions that
> > have been modified to use Argument Clinic.  A.C. was added, I believe,
> > in 3.5.  Simple builtins like len would have been the first to be
> > converted.  The math module was converted for 3.7.  There are some new
> > conversions for 3.8 and likely some will be left for future versions.
>
> I'm sure there are good reasons for it like most things Python does, but I
> can't help but wonder if working on removing the positional limitation from
> CPython would be a better use of time.

Do you ACTUALLY want to call math.sin(x=1.234) or is it purely for the
sake of consistency? Aside from questions about the help format, what
is actually lost by the inability to pass those arguments by name?

ChrisA