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A comment on What's Coming in Python 3.8. Parent comment

Re:What's Coming in Python 3.8 by masklinn on Thursday July 18, 2019 @04:48AM (#20467975)
> I also cannot honestly think of a case where I want that behaviour.

There's plenty of situations where a named argument does not help, and encoding it can only hurt. It makes little to no sense to name the first argument to `dict.update` for instance. Or the argument to `ord`.

That, incidentally, is why Swift added support for positional-only parameters (though it has no concept of keyword-or-positional).

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Re:What's Coming in Python 3.8 by Razengan on Thursday July 18, 2019 @09:23AM (#20469478)
> That, incidentally, is why Swift added support for positional-only parameters (though it has no concept of keyword-or-positional).

Swift's syntax is a lot more intuitive and consistent:

    function(parameterWithImplicitlyRequiredLabel: Int,
             differentArgumentLabel internalParameterName: Int,
             _ parameterWithoutLabel: Int, 
             variadicParameterWithLabel: Int...)
which you would call as

    function(parameterWithImplicitlyRequiredLabel: 1, differentArgumentLabel: 2, 3, variadicParameterWithLabel: 4, 5, 6, 7)
[0] https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/LanguageGuide/Functions.ht...
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Re:What's Coming in Python 3.8 by riffraff on Thursday July 18, 2019 @05:32AM (#20468135)
It does not help but doesn't hurt enough to grant a special syntax to avoid it.

Yes, it limits your ability to rename a local variable, but that seems minor.

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