PEP 736: Keyword Argument Shorthand: Final Draft

[blhsing (Ben Hsing)]

@ncoghlan

This is an interesting variation, but the dot is still pretty easy to miss. However, using @ could work:

my_function(
    my_first_variable=@,
    my_second_variable=@,
    my_third_variable=@
)

It’s using it as a mnemonic for “the value stored AT the local variable with the same name as the parameter”, rather than indicating any relationship with function decorators or matrix multiplication.

As mentioned in my post in the other thread, we can use a dunder keyword instead of a symbol to make the code look less cryptic/more Pythonic, at the cost of brevity:

my_function(
    my_first_variable=__same__,
    my_second_variable=__same__,
    my_third_variable=__same__
)

Tangent: if @ was adopted for this use case, then we could potentially also introduce @"" as a way to refer to the string form of assignment target names (as in MyTuple = namedtuple(@"", "a b c"))

This has now evolved into a possible keyword __target_text__ per our discussion in that thread:

MyTuple = namedtuple(__target_text__, "a b c")