Question

While I’m going through Python code and seeing functions called, I notice things like

functionCall(argument='something') 

or

someclass.functionCall(argument='something')

I’ve played around with it and noticed you have to name that variable with the same name as the one in the scope of the function or class function itself. Is that just a convention (for useful naming) or is there more to it that I’m missing?

Answer 1

Those are just standard keyword arguments.

They are mainly useful when calling functions that usually assume default values, but the user is interested in passing a custom value without affecting the other defaults.
For example:

def foo(a='a', b='b', c='c'):
    print a + b + c

Then:

>>> foo()
'abc'
>>> foo(c='x')  # don't know or care about a and b's value
'abx'