George Schlossnagle wrote:
Huh? Perl doesn't have true support for this anyway, just a simpler
syntax for hashrefs. If you want Perlish named params this is 100%
identical to doing
foo(array('id' => 42, 'name' => 'foo'));
If you are using this a lot then syntactic sugar does make a difference
IMHO. That's why we decided to use a patch to allow foo('id' => 42,
'name' => "foo");
I agree that a fancier way would be to have something like
function foo($id = 42) { ... }
...
foo(id: 64738, name: "foo");
and then access them through $_PARAM['id'] (or $id because the function
definition declares $id) and $PARAM['name'] respectively. What I don't
like about Python at all is that AFAIK you can't call a method with
parameters not declared in the function definition. That's a very handy
feature for things like DB actions or HTML generation.
Missing from the fancier version: Parameter names which aren't valid
identifiers and preparing an array with values before calling a
function. The first is a more hypothetical limitation as
fields/attributes are normally not containing non-identifier characters
but the second is a bit more practical:
$record->insert('id' => 42, 'name' => "foo");
works just as well as
$tags = array('id' => 42, 'name' => "foo");
... # Add more key/values to $tags
$record->insert($tags);
without requiring insert() to distinguish between the two. If someone
can come up with an elegant way to populate $_PARAM on a function call
then both these limitations would be gone.
That's it about named parameters from my side for now,
- Chris
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