[qquark]

Interestingly enough, the function def (the exec part) does not work in 3.6, as one could expect, but in 2.7 even though the function definition works, you can make the call fail by generating actual parameters:

  >>> exec("def f(" + ",".join("f" + str(x) for x in range(300)) + "): print(f299)")
  >>> f(*range(300))
  299
  >>> exec("f(" + ", ".join(str(i) for i in range(300)) + ")")
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
    File "<string>", line 1
  SyntaxError: more than 255 arguments

When reducing the number of parameters to be invalid for f, the following error is shown:

  >>> exec("f(" + ", ".join(str(i) for i in range(30)) + ")")
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
    File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
  TypeError: f() takes exactly 300 arguments (30 given)

Which seems a bit paradoxical - "You need 300 arguments" - "No, wait, actually, you can't have more than 255" ... ;)

It looks like they either had changed the internals of python 3, making it fail at the definition as a side effect instead of when calling, or used the same underlying logic but purposely chose to issue the exception to potentially catch the problem earlier...