On Sunday 27 February 2011 23:40:41 Bekenn wrote: > On 2/27/2011 11:32 PM, Russel Winder wrote: > > The Python mechanism relies on the fact that despatch is by name and not > > by signature. Languages that dispatch by signature will have > > significantly greater problems! > > I don't follow; the compiler has to look up the correct function > signature whether you use named arguments or not. How is this > significantly different?
You could be linking to code where you don't _have_ the source and don't _have_ the names of the variables. It's all done by the function signature in C, C++, Java, C#, D, etc. The names of the variables are completely irrelevant to calling the function, and so any linkers that follow C conventions (as with happens with D) _must_ be able to deal with function calls based on their signatures. That doesn't necessarily mean that it would be _impossible_ to find a way to have named arguments in D, but it makes it _far_ harder. - Jonathna M Davis