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I agree that the error message should be fixed; this is even
an 'XXX' comment ("an this isn't a bug?").
Unfortunately, just looking for bad keyword arguments is not
enough - it might even be that an optional keyword argument
is supplied, and still the error message is confusing, e.g. for
>>> re.compile("a").match(pos=10)
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: match() takes at least 1 argument (0 given)
Instead, I think the error message should read: 
TypeError: "pattern" argument for match() is missing
as we know exactly what "meaning" the missing argument has.
This might still be unspecific if multiple required
arguments are missing, but I think just giving the first one
would be informative enough - or else it could read
TypeError: "pattern" argument for match() is missing (+2 more)
if there are 2 more missing.
Yet alternatively, it could read
TypeError: required arguments for match() missing:
'pattern', 'foo', 'bar'
Patches in this direction are welcome; the precise wording
proposal should be mentioned on python-dev.