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C Python has a real wart in that standard types and library functions that are implemented in C do not always accept keyword arguments:
>>> 'xxxxxx'.find('xx', 4)
4
>>> 'xxxxxx'.find('xx', start=4)
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: find() takes no keyword arguments
>>> 
While other things do accept keywords:
sorted(s, key=bla)
We should clean this up. It is not well documented anywhere and I suspect other python implementations (haven't tested this) may accept keywords on these where C Python doesn't.
In string.find()'s case it looks like this is because it is an old style C method declaration that only gets an args tuple, no keyword args dict.