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It appears to me that the function I removed (see attached patch) is unused. Since I wasn't sure, I ran the entire test suite, and there wasn't a regression.

The _get_args() looks like an obsolete function indeed. However, _AttributeHolder is a base class for other classes, so the function was probably meant to be overridden by a subclass.
Steven probably knows the best whether it should be kept or not.

Yeah, the intention was that you could just override _get_args in a subclass to get a better __repr__. I think these days all the argparse classes only have keyword arguments, so _get_args probably isn't necessary anymore.

Following Steven’s message, I will remove the unused function.

Hm, I was about to commit this and did a double-take. Are we 100% sure that nobody in the whole wide world of Python does not override this function? Shouldn’t we first send a DeprecationWarning in 3.3 and remove later?

It's undocumented, and it begins with an underscore, but it would certainly be safer to deprecate it first.

If people do override this provate method, would they really bother calling super() to get the essentially no-op functionality of the superclass method? 
FWIW, Google Code and github both seem to be free of any such code.

> It's undocumented, and it begins with an underscore, but it would certainly be safer
> to deprecate it first.
Ah, somehow I misunderstood your earlier comment and thought _get_args had been publicized. Removing is safe then.
Geoffrey:
> If people do override this provate method, would they really bother calling super()
> to get the essentially no-op functionality of the superclass method? 
No, but they would expect __repr__ to use their _get_args, which it won’t after the removal (see the patch).
> FWIW, Google Code and github both seem to be free of any such code.
Thanks for checking. It’s only a fraction of all code out there, but it’s an indicator.

Nobody's really sure whether it's safe to remove, so let it be there. Leaving it can be justified by symmetry with _get_kwargs. Closing.

Any chance this issue could be reopened? I ran across this bit of code today when working on coverage for argparse. I'd like to again propose the removal or modification of _get_args. I understand that it's there primarily to be overridden, but even that's not useful. Because _get_kwargs uses obj.__dict__.items(), overriding _get_args to return an iterable of positional args results in those arguments being output twice when repr() is called (once formatted as a positional arg and once formatted as a keyword arg). You end up with strings like the below. I just can't think of any situation where this behavior would be desirable.
Action(['--foo', '-a', '-b'], 'b', option_strings=['--foo', '-a', '-b'], dest='b', nargs='+', const=None, default=42, type='int', choices=[1, 2, 3], help='HELP', metavar='METAVAR')