Flag proposal

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 6/11/11 9:08 AM, David Nadlinger wrote:
> On 6/11/11 1:54 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> Consider two statements:
>>
>> 1. "I dislike Flag. It looks ugly to me."
>>
>> 2. "I dislike Flag. Instead I want named arguments."
>>
>> There is little retort to (1) - it simply counts as a vote against. For
>> (2) the course of action is to point out the liabilities of changing the
>> language.
>
> *And*, at least for me, still count it as an (informal) vote against
> Flag.

Of course it does, but the point is there are arguments that might 
convince the person.

> You wrote about »The point is it [named arguments] would also have
> disadvantages«, but at the same time, you seem to ignore that using a
> non-obvious construct all over the standard library adds to perceived
> the »language complexity« (from the user's perspective) just as well,
> even more so if opDispatch or other »hacks« are used to beautify the
> implementation.

I agree that implementation complexity has a cost. That would be 
justified if the idiom becomes commonly used outside the library.

> Yes, I do think named parameters would be a step forward and we should
> definitely look into adding them to D. But independently, I don't think
> that reinventing bool in Phobos is a good idea.

You may want to refer to my answer to Michel.


Andrei