4 ms·

What's the argument against, well, named arguments? Is it a matter of brevity versus verbosity?

• jschwartzi 12y ago
  Well, function specifications in the link table would have to become more verbose, and the linker would have additional decisions to make. You could also wind up deferring a lot of problems that could be caught by compile-time checking until link-time, which might also be run-time. The problem that they're trying to solve is that people often use 5 arguments when a single struct would do.
  • kentonv 12y ago
    No, this proposal does not affect the linker at all. Argument names would be resolved to positional arguments during compilation.
    • jschwartzi 12y ago
      Yes, actually. You're right: > In this proposal, the association of parameter names with a function for the purpose of making calls with named arguments to that function happens locally in each translation unit, and new declarations within a translation unit can change a function's ability to be called with named arguments at call sites below the new declaration (by using different names than a previous declaration).
• evincarofautumn 12y ago
  It is exposing more implementation details to the consumer of an API. A function with named parameters can’t rename its parameters without callers needing to update all their named arguments. Not necessarily a bad thing. And verbosity isn’t so much an issue—I don’t mind writing a bit more code now if it’ll save me from a bughunt later. However, I do find named parameters suspect, not just because I don’t care for names generally, but also because they’re just papering over the problem of a function with many parameters, some of which have the same type. Faced with that problem, I usually reach for more descriptive types: enums instead of booleans, numbers that know about their units and axes and coordinate spaces, that sort of thing. Ideally, all arguments have different types and there is only one permutation of their order that the compiler will accept. It sounds onerous, but most of your functions probably satisfy this constraint already.
• opk 12y ago
  The problem is that all the names of parameters in every header file suddenly become enshrined as part of the API. You end up having to remove the names from all the system header files or first standardise their names. Otherwise, you'll quickly find code starts appearing that assumes the names as they are on Linux will then not build on BSD, Solaris etc.