Re: proposal: PL/Pythonu - function ereport

On 2/18/16, Pavel Stehule <pavel.stehule@gmail.com> wrote:
> it doesn't look badly. Is there any possibility how to emulate it with
> Python2 ? What do you think about some similar implementation on Python2?

The example code I gave works as is in Python2.

The Python3 keyword only arguments are only syntactic sugar. See
https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3102 for the details. But, as the
PEP notes,

def f(a, b, *, key1, key2)

is similar to doing this which also works in Python2

def f(a, b, *ignore, key1, key2):
    if ignore:
       raise TypeError('too many positional arguments')

For our case, we want to accept any number of positional arguments due
to compatibility so we don't need or want the check for 'too many
positional arguments'.

Note that in both Python 2 and 3, invoking f(1, 2, key1='k1',
key2='k2') is just syntactic sugar for constructing the (1, 2) tuple
and {'key1': 'k1', 'key2': 'k2'} dict and passing those to f which
then unpacks them into a, b, key1 and key2. You see that reflected in
the C API where you get PyObject* args and PyObject* kw and you unpack
them explicitly with PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords or just use tuple and
dict calls to peek inside.

What you loose by not having Python3 is that you can't use
PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords and tell it that detail and so on are
keywork only arguments. But because we don't want to unpack args we
probably couldn't use that anyway even if we wouldn't support Python2.

Therefore you need to look inside the kw dictionary manually as my
example shows. What we could also do is check that the kw dictionary
*only* contains detail, hint and so on and raise a TypeError if it has
more things to avoid silently accepting stuff like:
plpy.error('message', some_param='abc'). In Python3
PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords would ensure that, but we need to do it
manually.