Interestingly, I had already written almost exactly the same thing into my version of S06, but I've been holding off on checking it in while I mull over Luke's theory theory. Regardless of the actual syntax we end up with, I think everyone can assume that the compiler will be able to determine at compile time which pairs are intended to be named arguments and which ones positional parameters, and pass them as separate entities through whatever structure supplies all the arguments to a call so that the caller doesn't have to worry about making the distinction based on type.
It still has to figure out how to reconcile the named arguments with the positional parameters, of course, unless someone has made sufficient representation to the compiler that all calls to a particular short name have particular named parameters that are guaranteed to be in the same position everywhere, in which case the compiler is allowed to simply translate them to positionals on the call end. Perhaps it would be useful to allow a stubbed multi to declare the required names of positional parameters in some scope or other. This might be generalized to a translation service for calls outside the scope, where the current scope could even be the current language as a whole. That might alleviate cultural differences if one language always uses $left and $right where another uses x and y, for instance. Of course, I haven't eaten breakfast yet, so maybe that's impossible. Larry
