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Date: Sun, 14 Aug 2005 01:43:38 +0200
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To: George Schlossnagle <george@omniti.com>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: PHP 6.0 Wishlist
From: cschneid@cschneid.com (Christian Schneider)

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