The docstring of the "type" builtin is mildly confusing. Here's what the first few lines of the output for `help(type)` look like for me (on Python 3.10.0rc2):

class type(object)
 |  type(object_or_name, bases, dict)
 |  type(object) -> the object's type
 |  type(name, bases, dict) -> a new type

The first line there seems redundant, and potentially misleading, since it suggests that `type(object, bases, dict)` might be legal.

The third line is missing mention of possible keyword arguments.

Larry: the first line was introduced in #20189. Does it still make sense to keep it at this point?

Removing it makes sense to me.  Not sure what I was thinking, way back when.  Thanks for catching--and volunteering to fix--this!

It's unclear what the original comment was about. BPO-20189 is somewhat cryptic to me too. `inspect.signature` never supported `type`, `round`, `int`, and so on. I checked 3.4.10 and 3.5.10 and in each case it looks like this:

>>> inspect.signature(type)
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
ValueError: no signature found for builtin <class 'type'>


In fact, there's open issues on that, like BPO-44618.

New changeset 91275207296c39e495fe118019a757c4ddefede8 by Mark Dickinson in branch 'main':
bpo-45392: Update the docstring of the 'type' built-in (GH-29439)
https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/91275207296c39e495fe118019a757c4ddefede8

New changeset f5287ecd59d83a662490f89188a0fc2ef3718f8b by Miss Islington (bot) in branch '3.9':
bpo-45392: Update the docstring of the 'type' built-in (GH-29439) (GH-29453)
https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/f5287ecd59d83a662490f89188a0fc2ef3718f8b

New changeset 045f205ba4710c4c633364a4e2e098483af936e5 by Miss Islington (bot) in branch '3.10':
bpo-45392: Update the docstring of the 'type' built-in (GH-29439) (GH-29452)
https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/045f205ba4710c4c633364a4e2e098483af936e5

Thanks, Mark! ✨ 🍰 ✨