Named parameters

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 24 July 2015 at 21:11:20 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 7/24/2015 1:11 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> On Friday, 24 July 2015 at 19:59:17 UTC, Shammah Chancellor 
>> wrote:
>>> Funny, they work beautifully in C#.
>>>
>>> https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd264739.aspx
>>
>> Well, I don't know how C# dealt with mixing function 
>> overloading with named
>> arguments (I haven't read the article yet)
>
> Here's what it says:
>
> -----------------
> Use of named and optional arguments affects overload resolution 
> in the following ways:
>
> •A method, indexer, or constructor is a candidate for execution 
> if each of its parameters either is optional or corresponds, by 
> name or by position, to a single argument in the calling 
> statement, and that argument can be converted to the type of 
> the parameter.
>
>
> •If more than one candidate is found, overload resolution rules 
> for preferred conversions are applied to the arguments that are 
> explicitly specified. Omitted arguments for optional parameters 
> are ignored.
>
>
> •If two candidates are judged to be equally good, preference 
> goes to a candidate that does not have optional parameters for 
> which arguments were omitted in the call. This is a consequence 
> of a general preference in overload resolution for candidates 
> that have fewer parameters.
> --------------------
>
> D already has plenty enough overloading rules, UFCS, 
> overloading templates with non-templates, default values, 
> constraints, overriding, covariance/contravariance, auto ref, 
> etc., enough to thoroughly confuse everyone already :-)

Yeah. That sounds pretty ugly. And in D, we already tend to lean 
towards giving an error rather than picking a better option over 
a worse one in order to minimize problems related to overloading. 
We don't need that mess to be even more complicated - especially 
just for syntactic sugar (though I confess, that I do think that 
it's syntactic salt, so I'm obviously a bit biased against it 
anyway).

- Jonathan M Davis