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[Python-ideas] Why does BoundArguments use an OrderedDict?

Antony Lee antony.lee at berkeley.edu
Thu Dec 18 13:45:22 CET 2014 
2014-12-17 23:05 GMT-08:00 Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com>:
>
> On 18 December 2014 at 12:57, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 17, 2014 at 6:15 PM, Antony Lee <antony.lee at berkeley.edu>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> The discussion has drifted towards improving OrderedDict (something I
> >> certainly approve), but the semantic question is still there: why should
> >> BoundArguments.arguments be ordered by the parameter order?  For
> example,
> >> the recipe just below in the docs, for filling in the remaining default
> >> arguments, breaks that ordering, without even mentioning that.
> >
> >
> > Given that the answer hasn't been answered yet, perhaps nobody remembers
> the
> > reason any more. But why does it bother you so much? In my experience the
> > inspect module wasn't written for performance but for functionality. If
> it
> > really hurts your ability to do something that you need to be fast,
> perhaps
> > you can supply a patch? Make sure to run the tests and update the docs as
> > needed.
>
Actually the second example in PEP362 uses bind as an argument
type-checker, which should arguably be as fast as possible.  I'm opening an
issue with a patch right now.

>
> As far as I'm aware, it's an ordered dictionary because that makes the
> default repr() predictable when binding arguments for a given function
> (in the absence of after-the-fact manipulation like the example in the
> docs that injects the default values as explicitly bound arguments).
>
That can't really be the case as BoundArguments doesn't define a
__repr__... (and OrderedDict's __repr__ is a bit too verbose IMO, but
that's another issue and little can be done about it anyways).  Now that I
delved into the details of BoundArgument's implementation, I'll also note
that __eq__ also checks the arguments order, and again additional binding
will mess that up:

s = signature(lambda x=None, y=None: None)
ba0 = s.bind()
ba1 = s.bind(x=None)
ba2 = s.bind(y=None)
<apply recipe to add default arguments to ba0, ba1 and ba2>

Should ba0, ba1 and ba2 compare now equal or not?  As it is, we'll have ba0
== ba1 != ba2, which doesn't strike me as particularly reasonable.

Antony


> The inspect.signature() machinery includes quite a few things like
> that where the serialisation as a human readable string is considered
> as important then the programmatic representation.
>
> Cheers,
> Nick.
>
> --
> Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
>
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