Re: Challenging argparse with keyword dest="class"

"Peter J. Holzer" <[email protected]> Mon, 29 Dec 2025 15:53:54 +0100

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.python.general
Message-ID	<fen3424taiwpu7ao4os2f4plarr44tzhefevj3uikarzh6i3ph@lyz7woblzonx>

On 2025-12-29 22:50:41 +1100, Chris Angelico via Python-list wrote:
> On Mon, 29 Dec 2025 at 22:47, Peter J. Holzer <[email protected]> wrote:
> > As for the error message, I agree that "SyntaxError: invalid syntax" is
> > a pretty uninformative message. Python error messages in general have
> > become very good over the last few years, so that feels like a bit of a
> > throwback. I think it would be generally useful to improve that message
> > (maybe something like "expected identfier, got reserved word 'class'").
> 
> I wouldn't call it a throwback.

Yes, that was perhaps too strong a word. Anachronism? No, that's the
wrong direction.

Point is that we've been spoiled with high quality error messages in the
last few years, so now it's jarring to read a message which would have
been perfectly normal less than 10 years ago.

> Every improvement to the error messages happened because someone wrote
> code to detect a specific category of error and give a more helpful
> message.

Of course. Python doesn't improve itself. There are always people doing
the work. And useful error messages are particularly tricky.

        hjp

-- 
   _  | Peter J. Holzer    | Story must make more sense than reality.
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| |   | [email protected]         |    -- Charles Stross, "Creative writing
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