The dataclass decorator can take multiple parameters to enable or disable the generation of certain methods. PEP 634 Structural Pattern Matching extends dataclasses to also generate a __match_args__ attribute. I think adding a parameter to enable and disable generation of __match_args__ should be to dataclass should also be considered for consistency. Note that setting compare=False on a dataclass.field already excludes that field from __match_args__, but there is no way to disable generation of __match_args__ completely.