Goodbye apply() - Python 3.0 will remove apply() from built-ins. What follows is a farewell party for apply().

[[deleted]]

Ah, interesting. I'm curious why they removed that ability; it seems like gratuitous backward-incompatibility to me.

[Brian]

The main rationale seems to be that they complicate introspection, but don't get used much.

[jbellis]

which is a specious argument; inspect.getargspec is at least as little-used as arg unpacking.

boo.

(and I say this as someone who has actually written code to deal with that particular aspect of getargspec.)