DIP 1019--Named Arguments Lite--Community Review Round 1

[Yuxuan Shui]

On Monday, 4 March 2019 at 18:57:16 UTC, Olivier FAURE wrote:
> On Sunday, 3 March 2019 at 15:07:04 UTC, Joseph Rushton 
> Wakeling wrote:
>> Well, since the current DIP is entirely opt-in from the 
>> function author side anyway, it's a bit of a moot point. I was 
>> responding rather to someone who was arguing that it should 
>> _not_ be opt in for function authors.
>
> My point was, the DIP should be opt-out, because even then 
> library maintainers can always change argument names if they 
> want to, without breaking code. And even if code does break, 
> it's an extremely easy fix (as in, "change a few names until it 
> compiles", not "refactor everything").
>
> Like, okay, I get that some people are opposed to the very idea 
> of parameter names being important information to keep track 
> of, but pragmatically, the costs of making named arguments the 
> default are far outweighed by the benefits.

I agree that, having named arguments as the default would be 
better, _if_ we are designing a new language from ground up.

With D, even if we want to eventually make named arguments the 
default, it have to go through a deprecation path. IMHO, this is 
what a mature language should do.