Field objects with required arguments shouldn't be keyword arguments.

[craig@…]

Please consider making required arguments positional in the Field constructors. As far as I can tell this only applies to CharField which requires maxlength and FloatField which requires max_digits and decimal_places. It feels intuitive to have to enter these before the verbose_name argument in both of these cases, and reads very similar to the actual SQL as well.

name = meta.CharField(32, "Account Name")
balance = meta.FloatField(15, 2, "Current Balance")

Assuming I can attach files to a ticket I'll attach a diff that updates Fields.py and the core models. I've done some cursory testing (of the tutorial models, both the admin and the user sites), but nothing extensive.

[craig@…]

makes CharField's maxlength and FloatField's max_digits and decimal_places positional non-defaulted arguments for the constructors

[Jacob]

The The Zen of Python, second koan:

Explicit is better than implicit.

To me, meta.FloatField(15, 2, "Current Balance") is extremely unclear -- I'll constantly need to be looking up the order to give the numbers in. This might be worth thinking about for CharField so I'll leave the ticket open.

[craig@…]

Somebody suggested this for CharField on #django yesterday, and I liked the idea of less typing. Then I later thought that what's good for CharField would be good of FloatField too.

However, now that I'm thinking about it, this is only clear if you're accustomed to NUMERIC and DECIMAL data types in SQL. I just spend so much time using SQL that I sometimes forget how un-intuitive of a language it is.

There's no reason model syntax should mirror SQL syntax at the peril of clarity though, and I'm not sure that meta.CharField(32, "Account Name") is any more clear than the FloatField example, so maybe this ticket should be closed. I'll leave that to someone else to decide.

[Adrian Holovaty]

Closing for the reasons outlined by Craig in the last comment.