From: Toby DiPasquale <toby@...>
Date: 2005-10-24T07:41:31+09:00
Subject: Re: A comparison by example of keyword argument styles

On Sun, Oct 23, 2005 at 11:57:49PM +0900, Daniel Berger wrote:
> I could live with this particular exception.  Seriously, what are our
> alternatives for keyword syntax in method calls?
> 
> "foo(x: 1)"
> Pros: Probably easiest to parse.  Familiar to Smalltalkers and Lispers.
> Cons: Symbols force space, look ugly.
> Aside: I don't expect to see a lot of folks passing symbols to keywords
> arguments in practice.

For my part, I prefer this syntax. Its natural to Lisp programmers,
relives much of the parsing burden on the core code and is easy to
understand for people who haven't ever used Lisp. I can't see what's so
ugly about this syntax and I don't find much sense in Trans' arguments. As
for Sydney's syntax, it too is nice, but I would prefer the syntax that
can be parsed the fastest; Ruby doesn't need to get any slower before
YARV integration. I already have to write C extensions to do some stuff at
reasonable speeds, exactly the thing I got into Ruby to avoid ;-)

-- 
Toby DiPasquale