nltk/nltk — Issue #112: audit NLTK functions with boolean flag parameters
Author: alexrudnick
Created: 2012-01-17 06:26:20+00:00
State: open

There are a number of functions in NLTK that take boolean parameters, e.g.

* CorpusReader.abspaths(..., include_encoding=False)
* TaggedCorpusReader.tagged_words(..., simplify_tags=False)
* ClusterI.cluster(..., assign_clusters=False)

Guido has stated that one of the Python design principles is to avoid such
function definitions:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-August/055907.html

We should audit existing functions in NLTK that violate this principle, and
decide where it's worth deprecating the flags and adding new method names.

Migrated from http://code.google.com/p/nltk/issues/detail?id=544

earlier comments

StevenBird1 said, at 2011-04-10T07:15:48.000Z:

Postponing this to 3.0.