On Saturday, 23 January 2016 at 14:19:03 UTC, Jacob Carlborg
wrote:
This is mostly to prevent ugly hacks like Flag [1].
http://wiki.dlang.org/DIP88
[1] https://dlang.org/phobos/std_typecons.html#.Flag
To be pedantic, this would be adding named arguments, not named
parameters. The parameters are already named, but mixing up
arguments and parameters is a common mistake to make, and folks
do frequently talk about named parameters with regards to this
sort of feature.
Regardless, I for one, hope that we never have named arguments.
It's just one more thing that's then part of the function's
signature that you can't change without breaking code and will
cause that much more bikeshedding. At least right now, parameter
names don't matter much, whereas if they're part of the API, then
they're open to all of the issues that function naming has.
And while I appreciate that this DIP does not make named
arguments the default behavior for a function, making it up to
the library writer whether they support named arguments or not is
likely to create a lot of bikeshedding and debates over whether a
particular function or library should support named arguments.
Personally, I'd never use them under any circumstances.
However, I do appreciate that the DIP doesn't allow for
reordering the arguments based on their names. It does make named
arguments a bit less ugly.
- Jonathan M Davis
