What is wrong with the current wording?

What is wrong with the current wording?

"X operator" is not a compound term to be written as "X-operator".

What is wrong in double-star-operator? And what about ``*``\ -operator?

What is wrong in double-star-operator? And what about *\ -operator ?

My previous reply applies to both cases: "X-operator" is not a compound term to be written as such.

Regarding "double-star": it isn't referred with that name in any other place in the documentation, while "**" is, even where the "double-star-operator" reference point to.

Sorry, I'm not competent to review this PR.

Sorry, I'm not competent to review this PR.

It's alright :) Neither of us is a native English speaker. We are just doing our best.

@merwok perhaps we can merge this?

Thanks @andresdelfino for the PR, and @merwok for merging it 🌮🎉.. I'm working now to backport this PR to: 2.7, 3.7.
🐍🍒⛏🤖

GH-12573 is a backport of this pull request to the 3.7 branch.

Sorry, @andresdelfino and @merwok, I could not cleanly backport this to 2.7 due to a conflict.
Please backport using cherry_picker on command line.
cherry_picker dfd775a0b1aee51d842b20cdebd97cc52c0b32e7 2.7

IMO, this should not have been committed. The prior wording made it clear that the double-star for dictionary unpacking was distinct from the ** operator used to call __pow__.

Please place preference on the intent of the original writer of the docs.

Hi, @rhettinger ! While I agree that making it clear that ** does not refer to the operator implemented by pow is great, I don't see how the previous wording made that explicit. Also, note that we are saying "*" instead of "star" while talking about tuple/list unpacking in the previous paragraph, which would cause the same confusion.

I think we could improve the wording by explicitly saying that "**" does not refer to the operator implemented by the special method "pow", likewise for "*". What do you think? If you agree, I'll make the PR.

There is an example immediately below the change in collections.rst that should make it clear in context that ** is not exponentiation:

>>> d = {'x': 11, 'y': 22}
>>> Point(**d)
Point(x=11, y=22)

A clarifying remark (e.g. "not to be confused with exponentiation") could be helpful, but I don't have a sense of how likely that confusion is.