Many re methods accepted the string parameter as a keyword argument by wrong name. This was fixed in issue20283. Wrong keyword names were still accepted, but a deprecation warning was emitted if use them. Proposed patch finishes the deprecation period (started since 3.4) and removes the support of wrong names.

Python 2.7.7, 3.3.6, 3.4-3.6:

>>> import re
>>> re.compile('.').match(pattern='a')
__main__:1: DeprecationWarning: The 'pattern' keyword parameter name is deprecated.  Use 'string' instead.
<_sre.SRE_Match object; span=(0, 1), match='a'>
>>> re.compile('.').match(string='a')
<_sre.SRE_Match object; span=(0, 1), match='a'>

Python 3.7:

>>> re.compile('.').match(pattern='a')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: Required argument 'string' (pos 1) not found

It's too bad that "pattern" lost out to the less informative "string".

+1 for finishing the work and applying this patch.

"pattern" is not more informative, it is just wrong. The argument of the match() method is not a pattern, it is a string with which a pattern is matched.

New changeset f8678135c042 by Serhiy Storchaka in branch 'default':
Issue #29195: Removed support of deprecated undocumented keyword arguments
https://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/f8678135c042