The slash "/" as used in the documentation

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 6:51 PM Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
> > and not normally accessible to pure Python functions without
> > some arm twisting.
>
> In my first response on this thread I explained and demonstrated how to
> access signature strings from Python, as done by both help() and IDLE.
> Please read if you are concerned about this.  There is hardly any extra
> difficulty.  I did not discuss how to process the signature string
> returned by str(signature) nor how to access the information in
> Signature objects otherwise, but the str and Signature docs cover these.

The feature of positional-only args isn't available to pure Python
functions at the moment, other than by taking *args and then mutating
your own sig. Hence the slash is unfamiliar to people.

If we want arbitrary consistency, it might be better to work that way:
to let pure Python functions take pos-only args. I doubt it would be
of particularly great benefit, but it wouldn't hurt.

ChrisA