Aidan,
People often mention the 20/80 rule, we're so far away from there
that it's not even funny. It's more like the 1/99 rule, not to
mention 0.0001 / 99.9999 rule. That means that even if we could come
up with a way to improve that tiny fraction of cases, it would be
highly debatable whether we could justify adding another layer of
complexity into the language.
In those rare occurrences where named parameters have true benefits,
please live with the drawbacks of using array().
Zeev
At 09:17 15/01/2006, Aidan Lister wrote:
Ron Korving wrote:
Another nice use case is querybuilders:
$query = buildQuery(select: $columns, from: $tables, leftjoin: $leftjoins,
limit: 10);
We've seen a large number of cases where named parameters would be
extremely useful. To each case, there has been a half baked attempt
to dismiss the usefulness of the purported design.
For example,
> If you have too many parameters that you want to start omitting
> parameters when calling a function, its probably time to refactor.
Refactor? If you have a number of required options to get a result,
refactoring isn't going to change that.
Also,
> And if you have many parameters to functions you still need to look at
> the definition (or documentation) to figure out what parameters the
> function takes. It's not a big problem to look at the order at the
> same time.
That's not the point, at all. It annoys me that good points are
being dismissed with such ridiculous counter-arguments.
No one is suggesting that people shouldn't look at the definition.
Nor that people have problems remembering parameter order (I do, but
again, not the point). In fact, named parameters allows people to
quickly look at the definition to see what options are available.
This is one reason named parameters are an improvement on
associative array parsing.
The problem is when an option needs to be changed which just happens
to be at the very end of the function signature, function calls
start looking like this: foo(null, null, null, null, null, null, true);
Anyway, enough rebuttal. I think it's now incredibly obvious that
the wider community would like to see named parameters in PHP 6.
Are the PHP group prepared to accept and implement a named parameters patch?
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