Forced naming of parameters in Python

Question

In Python you may have a function definition:

def info(object, spacing=10, collapse=1)

which could be called in any of the following ways:<

Answer 1

As other answers say, changing function signatures is a bad idea. Either add new parameters to the end, or fix every caller if arguments are inserted.

If you still want to do it, use a function decorator and the inspect.getargspec function. It would be used something like this:

@require_named_args
def info(object, spacing=10, collapse=1):
    ....

Implementation of require_named_args is left as an exercise for the reader.

I would not bother. It will be slow every time the function is called, and you will get better results from writing code more carefully.