Thanks for bringing this up.

By changing this we would maybe be a little bit closer to PEP 0249. I don't get why the PEP author thinks that 'qmark' is less clear than 'numeric', though. I think they're equally clear.

The real reason why I object changing anything here, however, is that by changing the paramstyle we would break backwards compatibility. Third-party software like ORMs might depend on sqlite3 having paramstyle 'qmark'.

So now someone might suggest to make paramstyle an instance of a subclass of string that will successfully compare against both 'qmark' and 'named'. To which possible suggestion I say forget it. You cannot anticipate how people will really access the paramstyle. And if it would make a difference in real-world scenarios.