On 6/11/11 9:08 AM, David Nadlinger wrote:
On 6/11/11 1:54 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
Consider two statements:
1. "I dislike Flag. It looks ugly to me."
2. "I dislike Flag. Instead I want named arguments."
There is little retort to (1) - it simply counts as a vote against. For
(2) the course of action is to point out the liabilities of changing the
language.
*And*, at least for me, still count it as an (informal) vote against
Flag.
Of course it does, but the point is there are arguments that might
convince the person.
You wrote about »The point is it [named arguments] would also have
disadvantages«, but at the same time, you seem to ignore that using a
non-obvious construct all over the standard library adds to perceived
the »language complexity« (from the user's perspective) just as well,
even more so if opDispatch or other »hacks« are used to beautify the
implementation.
I agree that implementation complexity has a cost. That would be
justified if the idiom becomes commonly used outside the library.
Yes, I do think named parameters would be a step forward and we should
definitely look into adding them to D. But independently, I don't think
that reinventing bool in Phobos is a good idea.
You may want to refer to my answer to Michel.
Andrei
