DIP 1020--Named Parameters--Community Review Round 2

[rikki cattermole]

On 11/09/2019 2:52 AM, Paul Backus wrote:
> On Tuesday, 10 September 2019 at 14:19:02 UTC, rikki cattermole wrote:
>>> 2. Way too much verbiage for declaring functions with named arguments.
>>> 3.I still think the code breakage caused by named arguments is still 
>>> overblown, I never encounter anyone in the C# who complains about 
>>> code breakage regarding named arguments.
>>
>> The design C# has taken, was more restrictive and quite importantly 
>> more conservative than both mine and Walter's.
>>
>> That may have been a key factor in it not breaking peoples code.
> 
> Having read DIP 1020, Walter's proposal, and the C# article, the only 
> difference I can find (leaving aside the parts about templates) is that 
> C# is more restrictive about how named arguments may be reordered. I 
> fail to see how this difference could possibly have any impact on the 
> potential for code breakage, since if a parameter name is changed, code 
> will break regardless of what order the arguments are passed in.
> 
> If there's some other difference I'm missing that puts DIP 1020 and 
> Walter's proposal at greater risk of breaking code than C#'s named 
> arguments, I'd appreciate if you could point it out explicitly, since I 
> am probably not the only one to have overlooked it.

"No breaking changes are expected except in the case that any codebase 
declares an existing UDA called named."

I do not expect code breakage to occur in either case.
But I am concerned about the possibility and would prefer to design a 
little defensively (a few things like is expression handling for 
templates could break code if it was designed in a different way in DIP 
1020).