[Python-Dev] PEP 3102: Keyword-only arguments

Mon May 1 03:08:57 CEST 2006

"Nick Coghlan" <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:44549922.7020109 at gmail.com...
> Terry Reedy wrote:
>> "Talin" <talin at acm.org> wrote in message 
>> news:4453B025.3080100 at acm.org...
>>> Now, suppose you wanted to have 'key' be a keyword-only argument.
>>>> Why? Why not let the user type the additional argument(s) without the
>> parameter name?

Like Martin, you clipped most of the essential context of my question: 
Talin's second proposal.
>>> The second syntactical change is to allow the argument name to
>>> be omitted for a varargs argument:
>>> def compare(a, b, *, key=None):
>>> The reasoning behind this change is as follows. Imagine for a
>>> moment a function which takes several positional arguments, as
>>> well as a keyword argument:
>>> def compare(a, b, key=None):

Again I ask, why would one want that? And, is the need for that so strong 
as to justify introducing '*' as a pseudoparameter?
> Because for some functions (e.g. min()/max()) you want to use *args, but
> support some additional keyword arguments to tweak a few aspects of the
> operation (like providing a "key=x" option).

This and the rest of your 'explanation' is about Talin's first proposal, to 
which I already had said "The rationale for this is pretty obvious".
Terry Jan Reedy