DIP 1030--Named Arguments--Community Review Round 1 Discussion

[Panke]

On Monday, 10 February 2020 at 18:27:49 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer 
wrote:
> On 2/6/20 10:33 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> Once in a while, named arguments may
>> be useful, but for the most part, they're useful because a 
>> function has way
>> too many parameters, in which case, the function should have 
>> been designed
>> differently.
>
> I find this assertion lacking evidence.
>

Let me give a data point to the contrary. I am a C++ programmer 
at work and using CLion as my IDE. Recently CLion got the ability 
to display parameter names inline at call sides, that is given a 
function invocation

> foo(bar, baz, baraz)

of a function

> foo(parametertype1 parametername1, parametertype2 
> parametername2, ptype3 pname3)

it will be displayed like this with the parameter names in a 
slight gray:

> foo(parametername1: bar, parametername2: baz, pname3: baraz).

This already saved hours by preventing bugs and is unanimously 
considered an improvement by all my colleagues.

I am convinced named parameters can improve code quality and even 
expect that tooling will show up to insert them automatically in 
existing code, when they get into the language.