Pretty please: Named arguments

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Mon, 28 Feb 2011 14:33:55 -0500, Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg at gmx.com>  
wrote:

> On Monday, February 28, 2011 11:02:37 Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> On Mon, 28 Feb 2011 13:51:56 -0500, Jonathan M Davis  
>> <jmdavisProg at gmx.com>
>>
>> wrote:
>> > I'm not entirely against named arguments being in D, however I do  
>> think
>> > that any
>> > functions that actually need them should be refactored anyway. So,
>> > ultimately,
>> > I'm not sure that they're really all that useful. I'm sure that they'd
>> > be useful
>> > upon occasion, but if you actually need them, then your function is
>> > taking too
>> > many arguments.
>> >
>> > In actuality, if I were to vote on whether named arguments should be  
>> in
>> > the
>> > language, I would definitely vote against it (I just plain don't want
>> > the code
>> > clutter, and they strike me as a crutch to avoid writing functions  
>> with
>> > good
>> > signatures in spite of their usefulness in some situations), but I can
>> > see why
>> > some people might want them.
>>
>> Although I am not strongly for named arguments, I think they would be a
>> definite improvement.
>>
>> Bearophile brought up one of the strongest cases for them:
>>
>> foo(int width, int height) {}
>>
>> Seems simple enough, I don't see how you have "too many arguments", but
>> the call looks like this:
>>
>> foo(123, 456);
>>
>> So, looking at this call, can you tell which is width and which is
>> height?  I've seen some libs that use width and height do height first
>> also.  I usually have to go look up the API every time I'm  
>> reading/writing
>> one of these.
>>
>> But this is perfectly clear and resists API changes/differences:
>>
>> foo(width: 123, height: 456);
>>
>> The cool part about this is, named arguments are not required -- you can
>> always just not use them.  But when you do use them, the code becomes  
>> much
>> clearer.
>
> That does have some minimal benefit, but if you're really passing around  
> width
> and height much, then I'd argue that they should be put in a struct  
> rather than
> passed around bare like that, and then that fixes the issue.

foo(dimensions(123, 456));  // not helping

-Steve