🚫 The Day I Got Burned by My Own Bounding Box

So there I was, debugging a geospatial pipeline late at night — eyes heavy, caffeine fading, and logs overflowing with mysterious false positives.

We had a function that checks if a point is inside a bounding box. Pretty simple, right? Until someone (me 🙃) accidentally flipped the longitude bounds. And since the function just took five positional arguments, Python didn’t even flinch.

What Went Wrong?

Here’s how the original function looked:

Harmless… until someone writes this:

This runs. Silently. Incorrectly.

🛡️ The Fix: Keyword-Only Parameters

To prevent this kind of bug, I made a small but powerful change using Python’s * operator in the function signature:

Now, everything after * must be passed by name — no more guessing which number means what.

💡 Correct (and required) usage now looks like this:

It’s explicit. It’s clear. It’s impossible to get the order wrong.

🔍 Why I Love This Trick

This little * doesn’t just improve readability — it forces correctness. Especially in geospatial code, where numbers are flying around and lat/lon order mistakes are common, this is a tiny lifesaver.

So now, anytime I write a function with many numerical parameters, especially with similar meaning, I pause... and drop in the asterisk.

Tiny detail. Big impact.

Want more Python geospatial tips like this? I’ve got plenty of “learned-it-the-hard-way” tricks up my sleeve. Just ask. 😉

The ability to force keyword-only arguments using * in function definitions was introduced in Python 3.0 — yep, all the way back in 2008!

It’s part of Python's move toward making function signatures more expressive and preventing bugs from unclear argument usage. While it’s not new, it’s still underused — and when you start using it in the right places (like in geostatistics utilities), you’ll wonder how you lived without it.

#Python #geology #cardinalgeosciences #geomodeling