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From: Zachary Ware <zachary.ware+pylist@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2014 12:25:47 -0600
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On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 12:13 PM, Travis Griggs <travisgriggs@gmail.com> wr=
ote:
> So here=E2=80=99s my basic question. Is there anyway to programatically q=
uery that information in python code?
>
> inspect.signature(datetime.datetime.now)
>
> just gives a ValueError. inspect must only be good for the python code th=
at I write, in python. Is there another way to dig out what the interpreter=
 knows there?

Fixing that issue is in the works.  Argument Clinic[1][2] has been
added for Python 3.4 which, once all C functions have been converted,
will provide signature information for all builtins (functions written
in C).  If you try out the Python 3.4 RC1[3], you can try
inspect.signature(datetime.datetime.now) again and get the information
you expect: that's one of the (unfortunately relatively few) builtins
that is already converted.

Aside from the Argument Clinic effort, builtin functions are pretty
much black boxes to Python--hence why we're trying to fix it!

--=20
Zach

[1] http://docs.python.org/3.4/howto/clinic.html
[2] http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/default/Tools/clinic/clinic.py
[3] http://python.org/download/releases/3.4.0/