The grammar guarantees that 'yield from' statements have an expression to evaluate, plus a 'yield from' without an expression makes no sense.

Brett: can you clarify---in what sense is the argument optional?  I see that there's a doc issue at http://docs.python.org/dev/library/ast.html, where it's marked as optional but shouldn't but.  Is there something more that's wrong?

If you mean that ast.YieldFrom can be instantiated without an argument, isn't that the same for all the ast classes?

>>> ast.YieldFrom()
<_ast.YieldFrom object at 0x100760f50>
>>> ast.BoolOp()
<_ast.BoolOp object at 0x100760f90>

Where is the doc issue? And it's a bit more than just a doc issue anyway as Python.asdl has the same issue and that is what is used to generate the code that represents the nodes.

Ah, okay.  I only looked at Grammar/Grammar, which looks fine.

The doc issue is that at http://docs.python.org/dev/library/ast.html, under the heading "31.2.2. Abstract Grammar", it says:

  | Yield(expr? value)
             | YieldFrom(expr? value)

But the docs insert the contents of Python.asdl directly, so you're right: it's not really a doc issue.

Here's a patch.

New patch that removes some unnecessary braces in the case statements.

New patch: move new test to the correct test class.

New changeset ffb2fa900cb7 by Mark Dickinson in branch '3.3':
Issue #16546: make ast.YieldFrom argument mandatory.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/ffb2fa900cb7

New changeset 9bc6e157475a by Mark Dickinson in branch 'default':
Issue #16546: merge fix from 3.3
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/9bc6e157475a