From: "Berger, Daniel" <Daniel.Berger@...>
Date: 2005-10-25T06:44:52+09:00
Subject: Re: A comparison by example of keyword argument styles



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Louis J Scoras [mailto:louis.j.scoras@gmail.com] 
> Sent: Monday, October 24, 2005 3:29 PM
> To: ruby-talk ML
> Subject: Re: A comparison by example of keyword argument styles
> 
> 
> > What's wrong with making them all implicit instead of forcing me to 
> > add this extra, ugly syntax?
> 
> 
> Well, my gut instinct was that this is breaking 
> encapsulation: you didn't intend for that symbol to be in the 
> public interface. But the more I think about it, how often do 
> you changed the name of a parameter like this after the API 
> is solidified?

Never, unless someone suddenly comes along and tells you that your
parameter names can now be used as keywords. :)  But, once you realize
what the rules are, you'll always use sensical parameter names.

> It just feels wrong, as I'm sure being forced to explicitly 
> define how arguments are specified feels wrong to you.

Well, we've got a great use case in the Python community, where they've
had implicit keywords since 1.3 afaik.  If it were a problem in program
design they would have yanked it by now.  Or at the very least, we would
have heard lots of screaming.  We haven't.

Note also that I didn't support the notion of implicit keywords because
of Python (or any other language).  I only learned later about how
Python behaves.

Regards,

Dan