From: rcoder <rcoder@...>
Date: 2005-11-18T11:42:19+09:00
Subject: Re: Keyword arguments like grandma makes 'em

> I'm not sure that's neccessarily true. Yes it is true for 'and' and
> 'or' and a few others, but 'alias', 'begin' and other aren't really
> useful in the context of arguments, so they could still be used.

And how, exactly, would you decide which keywords were and weren't
useful in method argument context, given that just about everything
aside from basic assignment in Ruby is based on method calls? Something
about that smells awfully Pythonic to me...

One of my favorite aspects of Ruby's syntax is that *every* syntactic
structure is an expression which returns a useful value. While you
might not want to have a full 'case' switch tree inside the arglist,
the syntax does not prohibit it.

Making the overall syntax significantly more restrictive in order to
eliminate a single character sigil for keyword args (which, since most
methods require very few arguments, should be used only in the minority
of cases) is still a bad trade in my book.

Of course, for people coming to Ruby via Rails, I can see the appeal of
making keyword args as easy to use as possible, since the Rails team
seems to have a real fetish for having single "do-it-all" methods that
dispatch based on an arbitrary number of optional keyword args.

-Lennon