14 years later, we still don't know what it's for. Spotted by the PyPy developers. Original commit is: branch: trunk user: guido date: Mon Aug 19 21:32:04 1996 +0200 files: Python/getargs.c description: [svn r6499] Support for keyword arguments (PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords) donated by Geoff Philbrick <philbric@delphi.hks.com> (slightly changed by me). Also a little change to make the file acceptable to K&R C compilers (HPUX, SunOS 4.x).