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.