When I look at a function and do not understand what it does given it's name and list of arguments I look no more and write my own. Always. This is because my believe that if the author of that function did not bother to make the interface clear it says something about quality of the job as a whole (to me at least), and I don't have time to take chances or waste it reading more. Pavel On 4/17/13 11:02 PM, Nathaniel Echols wrote:

...

Also, I would prefer the function arguments to be spelled out explicitly without using *args and **kwds, so that I can figure out what arguments it takes without having to read through the function source code to figure out that internally you are calling self.as_miller_arrays(), and then have to go and look up the function arguments for that. My preference is actually the opposite (I do the same thing quite a bit in my code), because otherwise there is no guarantee that keyword arguments added to add_miller_arrays will also be usable with add_miller_arrays_map. Using *args, **kwds makes the APIs explicitly

On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 10:19 PM, Richard Gildea wrote: the same. (That said, I'm increasing favoring using **kwds alone in these circumstances.)

...

My IDE (WingIDE) shows me the function signature in its source assistant and also provides code completion for function arguments and keywords. However these won't be of much use when functions only list *args and **kwds. <insert generic snarky vi advocacy here>

-Nat _______________________________________________ cctbxbb mailing list [email protected] http://phenix-online.org/mailman/listinfo/cctbxbb

Thanks everyone for the feedback. I have never really collaborated on code, so I am in definite need of community opinion on matters of style. I have changed the method to reflect the present vote of 3:1 for explicit argument lists, and will keep the sentiment in mind in the future. I have also renamed the method as_miller_arrays_dict. I figure the rename is safe because it has only been a couple of hours since I pushed the original code. James On Apr 18, 2013, at 1:10 AM, wrote:

+1

If I want to make sense of a function the first thing I do is look at the keyword arguments: if I see "not telling" it does not make the code more usable to me. Of course if the doc strings define exactly what keywords to pass in and what they should do then fair enough: I have not looked closely enough at these examples to comment on the details.

Unlijke Pavel I would not necessarily write my own though :o)

Best wishes,

Graeme

On 18 Apr 2013, at 07:10, Pavel Afonine wrote:

...

When I look at a function and do not understand what it does given it's name and list of arguments I look no more and write my own. Always. This is because my believe that if the author of that function did not bother to make the interface clear it says something about quality of the job as a whole (to me at least), and I don't have time to take chances or waste it reading more.

Pavel

On 4/17/13 11:02 PM, Nathaniel Echols wrote:

...

...

Also, I would prefer the function arguments to be spelled out explicitly without using *args and **kwds, so that I can figure out what arguments it takes without having to read through the function source code to figure out that internally you are calling self.as_miller_arrays(), and then have to go and look up the function arguments for that. My preference is actually the opposite (I do the same thing quite a bit in my code), because otherwise there is no guarantee that keyword arguments added to add_miller_arrays will also be usable with add_miller_arrays_map. Using *args, **kwds makes the APIs explicitly

On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 10:19 PM, Richard Gildea wrote: the same. (That said, I'm increasing favoring using **kwds alone in these circumstances.)

...

My IDE (WingIDE) shows me the function signature in its source assistant and also provides code completion for function arguments and keywords. However these won't be of much use when functions only list *args and **kwds. <insert generic snarky vi advocacy here>

-Nat _______________________________________________ cctbxbb mailing list [email protected] http://phenix-online.org/mailman/listinfo/cctbxbb

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