[New-bugs-announce] [issue24834] pydoc should display the expression for a builtin argument default, not its result

[Larry Hastings]

New submission from Larry Hastings:

As discussed in #24824, inspect.Parameter currently only has a place to store the value of a default argument.  Which means, if a complicated bit of code was used to produce that default argument, all we have left is the value, not the code that arrived at that value.  Which means all pydoc can do is display the value.

When C extensions pass in their default arguments as expressions, it'd be great if we could preserve that text and present it to the user.  The example that resulted in us creating this issue: _codecs.encode() and _codecs.decode() both took an "encoding" parameter that defaulted to sys.getdefaultencoding().  The value of that function was (always) "utf-8".  It's slightly more meaningful to display
    encoding=sys.getdefaultencoding(),
than
    encoding="utf-8",
in pydoc.

As a first approach, I propose we add a new member to inspect.Parameter, call it "symbolic_default_value", which contains the expression passed in by Argument Clinic (if present).  pydoc should look for this member when computing the documentation for a function, and prefer to present it to the user over the actual default value.

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assignee: larry
messages: 248318
nosy: larry, serhiy.storchaka, yselivanov
priority: normal
severity: normal
stage: needs patch
status: open
title: pydoc should display the expression for a builtin argument default, not its result
type: enhancement
versions: Python 3.6

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue24834>
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