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

Paul Backus snarwin at gmail.com
Fri Mar 22 16:58:09 UTC 2019


On Friday, 22 March 2019 at 15:23:54 UTC, Yuxuan Shui wrote:
> 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.

Deprecation is typically used for changes to existing 
functionality that could break existing code. For example, the 
upcoming change to enable DIP 25 by default requires a 
deprecation process, because enabling DIP 25 will cause some code 
that currently works to fail to compile.

Named arguments, however, are a purely additive change to the 
language. They will not break any existing D code, because all 
existing D code uses positional arguments, and positional 
arguments will continue to work the same way they always have. 
Why, then, is a deprecation process necessary?


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